I would love to see this fought in court for my local neighborhood restaurant. No way would a US court hold that GDPR has any standing.
> The second exception is for organizations with fewer than 250 employees. Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are not totally exempt from the GDPR, but the regulation does free them from record-keeping obligations in most cases (see Article 30.5).
It will for the first be too small to require much record keeping.
Second, it is unlikely to be keeping any personally identifying information from someone using the site while in the EU because nobody is ordering food from a pizza place in NYC while sitting in Napoli. IP address is sometimes PII but more often not.
Thirdly, as your local restaurant does not have any business operations in the EU any potential fines levied against them would probably be unenforceable.
Those are just the top three things that spring to my mind though, pretty sure that there are other reasons the worry is nonsensical.
A European could order delivery in the USA for a friend. The business (website) would happily accept money for this.
Thus a small florist does not operate the same way as a small local restaurant, the big international company with my personal information however will be on the hook for it and should have processes in place to handle that.
I don't think this is that crazy of an example in this world.
https://www.hipaajournal.com/does-gdpr-apply-to-eu-citizens-...
"GDPR requires the personal data of an individual residing in an EU country to be subject to certain safeguards and their data rights and freedoms must be protected. When an individual leaves an EU country and travels to a non-EU country, they are no longer protected by GDPR."
It was quite a common misconception when GDPR was first being formalized that it would apply to EU citizens physically located outside of the EU, indeed if you go back about 6 years you would probably find me making the same incorrect argument on HN.
"When an individual leaves an EU country and travels to a non-EU country, they are no longer protected by GDPR."
and
"If an EU citizen travelled to the United States and interacted with an EU business, which required the collection of their personal data, their data rights and freedoms would be dictated by US federal and state laws. GDPR would not apply."
true, this is inside a section where the headline refers to people 'living' in the US (which of course implies taking up a long term residence there), but the text of the body makes clear that just traveling to the US means that, as one would normally expect, the laws of the US pertain and not the laws of the EU.
It makes zero sense to suddenly say that it matters where the company is if the EU citizen isn't in the EU anymore, but it doesn't matter where the company is if the EU citizen is in the EU.
Either the EU can make a law apply to my website, or it can't. If it can, why does it not do it all the time? If it can't why does it claim it does?
I'm personally of the opinion that they can't, and I'm going to keep acting accordingly.
And I'm willing to bet so are the vast majority of other websites. If anybody sees a drastic drop in Google Fonts usage, let me know. Otherwise I'll just keep saying, "I told you so." Nobody actually believes the EU can do this.