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> The EU is powerful, sure, but if I was China I might just tell them to piss off when they come knocking.

It's not really Chinese companies doing the tracking, it's American ones.

The EU is simply too big a market for them to ignore.

I don't disagree, but China was just an example of a country that could feasibly tell them to get bent. What would they do about it? Trade sanctions? Most of the shit in Europe is made in China, too.

They won't go against China per se. They'll go against individual companies through whatever trade agreements connect Europe and China. Maybe Baidu or Alibaba would be strong enough to use Chinese government to turn this into a stalemate. But it probably wouldn't be worth the effort. I doubt they make that much money of wanton analytics abuse anyway. For every other company though, they either comply with GDPR or get out of the European market.

(The trick depends in part on companies wanting access to EU more than EU wanting a particular company to sell to its people.)

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