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I live in Portugal, an EU country. After a complaint, our National Data Protection Commission fined one of my neighbors for having posted certain personal data of other tenants on our building hall.

They care.

Emirates gets a big chunk of their revenues from EU customers. They definitely don't want to piss of EU regulators. As for US regulators, they've been at odds with them for some time, so Emirates will probably try to fight them before giving in. But this particular privacy hole is the size of a crater - it will be hard to fight the regulators. In fact, as a software architect, I feel that the solution is far cheaper than fighting regulators.

Emirates has a physical presence in the EU and would definitely be subject to EU regulations when a flight to, from or purchased in the EU is involved.