I'd guess he's referring to your (likely correct) implication that the regulators will give more weight to your "friendly and helpful" behavior than to how the text of the law applies to the facts of your case.

The concept of the rule of law was invented primarily in countries that now belong to the EU. Is there no one left there who still thinks it's important? It's not even that people argue "the GDPR couldn't be less vague without loopholes, and this is important enough that it's worth the cost". The idea that a powerful human's best attempt to objectively apply stable, published rules is generally better than a powerful human's unrestrained discretion just seems foreign to most commenters here.

If you ran an organization publicly associated with George Soros in Hungary (whose prime minister has described him as an "enemy of the state"), then would you still feel good relying on your friendly relationship with the government? What steps would you take to comply with the GDPR as it's currently written, if you couldn't rely on the goodwill of the people interpreting it? With a sufficiently corrupt government, there's nothing you can do; but the point where a judge will accept an obvious lie tends to come long after the point where a regulator lets politics disambiguate a vague standard.

That's something that utterly amazes me about the EU, and your comment. A lot of the protections that exist for privacy in the US against authorities mostly don't exist in the EU.

The EU lets every police force in the EU, or in Interpol request data interception. That is a LOT of organizations, and of course, they got caught doing abuse just the same. But, for instance, the default practice in the US is that you get told your phone is tapped (yes, really), unless the police explains to a judge why not (nearly always), BUT in that case you still get told afterwards. This does not exist in the EU. You will never be told you got tapped.

Second, in the US, the provider looks at the order, verifies it with the proper authorities, and decides for itself on scope, reasonableness, ... etc. In the EU, nope. If an order is received the only actions that a provider can take must be technical in nature. In theory an employee that does the actual tapping of the phone can't even tell his manager he's tapping phones, and definitely he can't tell anyone which phones are to be tapped or why (nor is there any obligation on the part of the requesting force to tell him why, but it is a field on the form). In many countries, this can be done without judicial oversight, or in nearly all cases with only very, very light oversight. This, to me, is far more worrying than the situation in the US.

If a local police officer in Latvia wants to tap the phone of anyone in the EU, he just has to fill out a form and fax it to interpol.

This is even weirder given that Europe has actual experience with abuse of surveillance powers, everywhere from Germany Eastward, as well as during WWII. They KNOW what can go wrong, they just have to ask their parents or grandparents to find people who were actually exposed to this. And yet ...

Next we find out that large-scale spying on the own population is done in, at least, UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands ... and not a peep. This was barely reported in the local media, in fact. We all know that most other countries are going to be worse than these, not better. And, of course, they cooperate with the NSA as well.

Hell, the US has reporting on how much they spy on their own citizens (in fact, that's the source of most of the outrage). No such stats in the EU. Nobody, not even the police forces themselves, feels the need to have the most banal, basic level of transparency.

Clearly when it comes to spying the EU is of the opinion, them, yes, perfectly allowed. Think of the children ! I mean, clearly these guys do not believe in privacy.

So yes, it is very Orwellian when they just request that you work with them on the privacy of their citizens. Clearly the result they want is not actual privacy and protections for their citizens.

If they believe in privacy protections, they have a lot of state agencies that they need to attack for not having any decent respect for privacy, as well as the fact that what few protections do exist only exist in a vast complex tangled web that errs on the side of violating people's privacy. And that's ignoring the fact that privacy protections have been systematically eroded further and further in Europe (e.g. recently in Germany).