Mark Carroll's Journal

I don't even wish to log in to the sites and tell them things about myself, I also use privacy-enhancing plugins, I simply can't view the sites at all. In general it's extra-territorial effect that frustrates me, both from US and EU laws. If I choose to deal with a business in a different jurisdiction then I much prefer to be able to do so on the basis of the laws that they typically operate under rather than to be wholly barred because the alternative for them is to also have to deal with foreign sets of laws. Data protection regulation is great and when I really care about it I can choose to deal with EU-based organizations accordingly but imagining the whole world is willing to live under one's local laws mostly has the predictable effect of blocking off those other options entirely rather than improving them and, in this kind of case, there simply isn't some EU-based alternative I can use instead. (Even less likely when the problem is intersection of multiple jurisdictions' extra-territoriality.) The UK generally gets this right, I was generally a fan of the DPA and there isn't much UK-based legislation that tries to reach overseas like that.