Facebook to change user terms, limiting effect of EU privacy law
This article is really confusing.  Basically the point is that under the current terms of service they tell you that if you are outside of the US then you are doing business with their Ireland office.  Since the Ireland office is in the EU, it is subject to the GDPR.  So that means that everybody outside of the US will be covered by the GDPR (because they are doing business with an EU company).<p>They are changing their terms of agreement to now say that people outside of the US are doing business with the US company.  This means that only people in the EU will be covered by the GDPR.  Probably that&#x27;s what they should have been doing all along, but there were probably massive tax advantages to running their international company in Ireland.<p>For what it&#x27;s worth, I&#x27;m a huge proponent of GDPR and I would probably do the same thing -- at least initially.  They have a <i>lot</i> of users and GDPR is <i>really tricky</i> to implement when dealing with any manual processes.  Limiting your exposure is common sense.<p>I&#x27;m looking forward to seeing what actually happens to Facebook when GDPR comes into force.  You <i>know</i> people are going to exercise their rights and I just can&#x27;t imagine they are prepared.  As I&#x27;ve been going through this stuff in my job I can&#x27;t see any easy ways to sweep this under the carpet -- you not only need to inform the user about what&#x27;s going on, you actually need to record the lawful basis that you&#x27;ve told them you are using.  If you just say, &quot;Oh I have consent&quot; then the user can withdraw consent.  If you actually needed that information (like the user&#x27;s name!) then you are absolutely screwed.<p>I fully expect some thoughtful users to nail them to the wall.  And when that happens, I expect them to implement everything world wide because it will be a lot easier&#x2F;cheaper than maintaining different processes all over the place.