We've seen a number of lawsuits posted here on HN with EU companies, either going after other EU companies, or US companies, or other EU <-> US <-> AU lawsuits. Sure a lot of it involves the bigger shops like Microsoft/Google/Facebook, etc .. but don't go saying it's not a litigious society.

Lawsuits are used in a lost of western and eastern countries to try and right wrongs. Many of them use lawsuits to troll and money grab as well. It's not unique to the US.

IANAL but my understanding is that contrary to US, several EU countries have limitations to what on can claim in court. Claim can not exceed damage. If you burn yourself with a hot coffee in a mc donalds your medical expense will covered and you might get a couple hundreds or a thousand while in the US you can be awarded millions in punitive damage by a jury.

This limitations means there's less frivolous litigation in the EU, unless it's a rich person or entity trying to silence someone, then they will waste money on frivolous litigation until the other party is unable to take it anymore (SLAPPs) a well known example of this is what happened to journalist Denis Robert who went through 10 years of multiple litigations in several countries for daring to expose the money laundering scheme happening in the European banking system in Luxembourg.

FYI, there are no lawsuits with GDPR: You file a complaint with the relevant data protection agency and they then decide whether to pursue this. Should they do that, the company can dispute the claim and only then elgal proceedings would follow (agency v company, no potential award for person filing complaint)

  Just act in good faith and GDPR will not bite.

Do you have $20million to make that gamble?

20 million is the max penalty for repeat offenders. See article 83 about fines being proportinate to the offense: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-83-gdpr/

This is a european thing, if any law says $x is the max fine or alike, then for a first time offense you usually get much less.

I would still be bankrupted by "much less" than $20 million.

Good for you.

now understand that fines are proportionate to the offense. Are you engaging in doing very bad thing to personal data on a very large scale and having a business based on this ?

no ? then what are you afraid of ? that failing to answert to one guy asking for what data you have on him will cause you to be fined to bankruptcy level ? I pity the fool as said that one guy.

Your fundamental argument seems to be "this will only affect bad actors" but I don't think the history of law in any part of the world justifies such optimism.

Or how about: I'm sure the advocates for civil asset forfeiture made similar arguments.

If you want to argue that prosecutors on your side of the pond are impervious to corruption, well, consider that you're including Spain, Italy, and Greece in that body politic (at least for now).

"usually" is the problem.

how is interpretation of the law not a problem with any law that was in effect before GDPR. It didn't stop anybody from starting businesses before and will not after.

It's punishment amounts. Laws should strive for minimal maximums and reasonable ranges to apply that interpretation in. We don't say every crime is punishable up to a life sentence for a reason. The more leeway the law provides, the more room for abuse (for either side). It would not have been hard to define multiple reasonable ranges, but sadly they think these values are what gives the law "teeth" (instead of actual enforcement which is what should provide it).

The EU had competition law before that mentions 10% of global turnover as a maximum fee, along with very detailed notes of how to set them: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:...

The Sherman Act also mentions a ceiling of 10 million, 3 years of prison for private persons. And from history we know antitrust authorities broke up companies like AT&T or Standard Oil, which seems to me a much bigger punishment.

Both laws only mention the maximum fine.

Yet you don't see small companies sweating over competition law.

> Yet you don't see small companies sweating over competition law.

They would if it applied to them and they had to do work to comply. This is very simple. If a law applies to a company, companies will worry about it and the perceived risks. If a law doesn't apply to a company, they won't worry. Ideally, both the laws and their punishments are as narrowly scoped as possible to prevent abuse at the whims of enforcer subjectivity. It goes without saying that a business not affected by a law won't sweat it like they might if affected by a law. Couple that with ambiguities in the legislation and effort to comply and it's clear why small businesses sweat one and not the other. It's a very poor comparison.

your argument applies exactly the same to GDPR, entities that do not engage in collecting or processing personal data have no reason to sweat. Those who are following the law that had been introduced in the EU in 1995 either.

Had you read the GDPR you'd knew that punishment is proportional to the offense, had you read the regulation in charge of receiving complaints you'd know that they said they will first give a chance to comply to the law before resorting to punishment. The only ambiguity is in the broad term "legitimate interest" offering exemption to GDPR.

Sorry but I don't understand how defining multiple ranges would have been simpler than only having one. I also fail to see how 4% of global annual revenue is unreasonable considering facebook and google have both been fined the previous maximum amount of 150 000€ with no consequences for them and they went about their day keeping at doing what they were doing that caused them to be fined.

Nobody will fine an open-source project that amount of money. The goal of GDPR is not to bankrupt anybody but to nudge them into compliance. If you aren't maliciously handling user data, you are not a target of high fines.

Then why does the law not have this an an exemption?

Have what as an exemption? Not applying GDPR to small-time open source projects? Being open source doesn't suddenly make it fine to mishandle users' information.

GDPR has exemptions built in but being open source project is not one.

First, that is the maximum. Second, no one scare mongered about the old maximum fines of £500k (which BTW were never used).

https://government.diginomica.com/2017/08/10/ico-maximum-fin...

Or 4% of your world revenue whichever is largest.

Then again you can stop brandishing this FUD as this kind of fine is not gonna happen to small actors. If you act in good faith and are found doing something wrong you'll receive a notification asking you to fix the issue.

Why do people think EU is dumb and will start distributing 20M fines right and left at the first offense ? Just look at how it's done up until now and what CNIL said about how GDPR will be applied.

Let's not talk theory. I am making that gamble. Business is about risk judgement, and I have judged the risk to be miniscule.

There are litigious people even here, though. Someone who has an axe to grind for whatever reason can keep annoying the DPA until they do go after you.

No, that simply doesnt happen. Ive annoyed the ico in the uk many times and they refuse to do anything for one complaint. I recently got a 500gbp out of court settlement in a spam lawsuit that the ico did fuck all about.

> that the ico did fuck all about.

I think this is the really important bit that Americans are missing.

We've had decades of regulation from ICO, and we've seen them do fuck all about a lot of stuff. GDPR isn't going to change their approach.