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0 pointsanonymouz7y ago0 comments

From Wikipedia:

> BetonSports plc is a British online gambling company founded by Gary Kaplan in 1995. The company was one of the biggest players in the United States online gaming market, drawing in several billion US dollars in wagers in the early 2000s.[1] In June 2006 US authorities indicted the company and a number of its executives on RICO, mail fraud, and tax evasion charges arising from its supplying online betting to customers in the United States (the alleged crimes took place before the adoption of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006).

This is about federal crimes committed by executives of a billion-dollar company.

OP seems to be a solo open-source project, and violating the GDPR is not a criminal offense. This isn't even close to being comparable.

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kybernetikos7y ago

While I agree that violating the GDPR is much less likely to result in being pulled off a plane than running a company that allows people to gasp gamble on the internet, your characterisation of the problem as 'federal crimes' seems to suggest that there was something much more nefarious going on than simply allowing people in another jurisdiction to do something over the internet that is completely legal in the jurisdiction you are based in. I could be wrong, but according to my understanding, that's not the case.

The 'federal crimes', were precisely enabling US customers to gamble over their phone lines. That was enough to get a publicly traded company in a friendly nation categorised as 'organised crime'.

The other thing you mention about how it's not a criminal offense is something important a lot of people seem to be missing. If you're violating the GDPR and someone notices, the first thing that happens is that they work with you to try to correct the problem, not that they hit you with huge fines and laugh while twirling their mustaches.

anonymouzOP7y ago

Maybe we just misunderstood each other a bit: My point about the 'federal crime' is not to judge gambling as more nefarious, but to simply point out that the violated law in this case is a completely different type of law (criminal).

As you correctly note, the GDPR is an EU regulation that will be enforced by national regulatory bodies through warning letters and fines. Unlike for criminal offenses, there simply is no way for it to be enforced by a police force or through arrests.

lovich7y ago

I don't like government, but companies sucking up everyone's data for sale right now certainly seem like mustache twirlers to me.

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