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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

> If it's to be permitted to be sent to America at all

Do you mean that I, an EU citizen am being granted some special privilege from EU leadership to send my data to the US?

It's the other way around. The EU has granted US companies a temporary permission to handle EU customers' data. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Data_Privacy_F...

I say temporary because it keeps being shot down in court for lax privacy protections and the EU keeps refloating it under a different name for economic reasons. Before this name it was called safe harbor and after that it was privacy shield.

No, the company you're sending it to is required to care for it. Up to and including refusing to accept that data if need be.

Of course you don't need permission to do something with your own data. But if someone wants to process other people's data, that's absolutely a special privilege that you don't get without committing to appropriate safety protocols.

It works the other way around; the American company is granted a special privilege to retrieve EU citizen data.

I'm not sure they are "retrieving" data. People register on the website and upload stuff they want to be processed and used.

I mean, sometimes the government steps in when you willingly try to hand over something on your own will, such as very strict rules around organ donation, I can't simply decide to give my organs to some random person for arbitrary reasons even if I really want to. But I'm not sure if data should be the same category where the government steps in and says "no you can't upload your personal data to an American website"

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