becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone talk about this at all on Tumblr, which is very lax of us all, so I suppose I shall do it myself.

Last week Elon Musk broke European law so badly that the lawyers who will finally put the case to rest have yet to be born.

I’m not exaggerating. Here’s the thing: America has terrible data privacy laws. A solid technique for an American website owner in times of financial hardship, such as accidentally buying a loss-leading debt-ridden social media platform to avoid going to gaol, is to take all the data harvested from users and to sell it to third parties for lots of money. It is fun and breezy and lets you pay off at least one lawyer for the month. What a lark.

However, the European Union has an even more fun and breezy law called GDPR.

And the thing is, the EU really, really care about GDPR. Like… they really care. This is not one of those grey area laws like jaywalking where it’s basically ignored unless you do it in front of a police officer who is having a midlife crisis because his wife left him and the dishes are piling up and he’s down to his third day of wearing the same pants and yesterday a man in the pub laughed at him for getting a football term wrong. This is the sort of law that, if you break it, grey men in grey suits with worryingly little humour will get in touch and unroll terrifyingly long scrolls of legal text and then you are in gaol for the rest of your life. This is a big law. The big one. Big boy law. Do not break.

So, if you’re going to be a website owner in times of financial hardship who needs some quick money to cover your many billions of dollars of debt who decides to sell the private data you harvested from the user base, the most important thing you absolutely MUST remember is, you can only use the American data, and never the European.

But.

I mean.

Hypothetically.

If someone were to own an American website in times of financial hardship, such as an accidentally bought loss-leading debt-ridden social media platform to avoid going to gaol… but that someone didn’t know the difference between American and European law.

Well then. That person would sell the wrong data.

And if that were to happen, on the scale of a global social media platform, with users ranging from the megalomaniacal Uber Rich to literal world governments…

The ensuing court cases would last for decades, as lawyers began the lawsuits at the richest end of the list, and worked their way down.

***

Also he posted a Twitter poll today about whether he should stay in charge of Twitter and he lost lol