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Comment by jmcs | Hacker News Reader

"The Services are offered from the United States of America and, regardless of your place of residence or access location, your use of them is governed by the laws of the United State of America. Right Dao makes no representations that the Sites are appropriate for use in other locations or are legal in all jurisdictions. Those who access the Sites from other locations do so at their own risk and consent to the transfer and processing of their data in the United States of America and any other jurisdiction throughout the world."

That's half the reason I don't use Google right there and they pretend to follow European laws. So, yeah, right, no thanks.

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Here's the problem with EU regulations: they really do bar small projects and hobbyists and assume that even the smallest website is backed by a corporation with resources to comply with pretty complex rules.

Actually, that's not really true. If you don't store any user information, you're compliant.

It's only if you start storing those that you have some rules to follow. Nowadays, it's the same if you are in California with the recent data protection laws.

Also, Right Dao is under New York law, so it has to follow US law I guess.

"If you don't store any user information, you're compliant."

So, how do I do business with people?

That is a horribly wrong view point. Information required for business purposes, e.g. to write invoices or file taxes is considered user information you are fine to retain.

It's not about not having information, it's about having consent before acquiring it.

I think you are not understanding what the point of view is. These regulations inject a whole set of requirements on a hobbyiest, not for profit or tiny business to write code to track regulatory compliance and ensure that various processes exist the law requires. Those requirements are often more complex and costly than the core business.

For small businesses that don't have a large mess of legacy stuff to clean up, the requirements aren't that bad. Yes, it is extra effort, but mostly documentation, and lots of it can be minimized by keeping as little data as necessary.

I read that as a real benefit, I read it as:

You search something which we hope is useful for you as the cosumer. We wont the overly smart and show you information we think might be more fitting or relevant because we tracked you down to live near a super-potent adwords custimer and therefore rank his results higher in your search results.

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