Facebook urged to make GDPR its “baseline standard” globally

GDPR is a threat to freedom of speech while not changing much in term of privacy as worst actors is governements themselves. Edward Snowden revalations are 100x worse than whatever worse FB scenario you are picking.

GDPR sets a bad precedent with local laws impacting foreign businesses. In this logic, why Chinese speech laws shouldn’t apply to EU and US companies if GDPR applies globally?

The main problem is that EU legislation is complex and subject to interpretation for which we have no precedents. Such legislation is easily exploited by authorities to silence opposition. As Napolen never said, "A Constitution should be short and obscure." GDPR is long and obscure. That leaves even more power to the executive.

This situation benefits large corporations - such as Facebook - who can afford an army of lawyers and can deploy resources to legal fights in any country. Small actors with dissenting views are hopelessly disadvantaged in this kind of a setup, and I forecast that we'll see authorities shutting down blogs and websites using GDPR as their tool.

1. There might be significant internal hassle involved in working with more than one standard of integrity within a single company dealing with integrity as its currency and user base as pillars. It may be easier for them to just use a common one even if it is more restrictive, at least if it is backed by a population of 500 million people.

2. Facebook are going through a PR crisis and need to dig out of that hole somehow. If they only adopt EU regulations in the EU, it could be seen as Facebook are only doing the least they can to protect the integrity of their users and that this is seen as a better move?

It's funny how GDPR coincides with the Facebook scandals as of late, though... Their lawyers and engineers have got to be buried with work. I can't even begin to imagine what a company of Facebook's scale and business model need to do to support GDPR globally.

As an European living abroad, I still have no idea if I will be protected by the GDPR. I read at least 2 opposite answers on HN on the last days: "yes because you are a EU citizen", "no because it's where you are when the data are collected that matters".