[peoplewindow]

Leaving doesn't mean erasing all the profiles. It just means shutting down local corporate presences. It'd suck for the employees but Facebook can run things out of Palo Alto just fine.

I'm not sure what it'd involve for contracts and payments. But many EU firms have US legal presences too. They could easily buy ads on Facebook through their US presence. Multi-nationalism works both ways.

[manmal]

The GDPR does not allow international players to store data on EU citizens without conforming to the rules. So if FB leaves in order to avoid conformance, then they have to delete all EU citizen data.

[kasey_junk]

The point is without a European corporate presence the EU loses its ability to enforce GDPR.

[manmal]

You are right, this might be the case, someday.. but as long as they have their tax-free money parked in the EU, removing all legal entities from the EU will be very expensive..

[kaybe]

Can ads be sold internationally that easily?

[kasey_junk]

No idea but GDPR gives folks a lot of reason to figure it out.

[Xylakant]

Let them buy ads targeted to their EU customers through their US presence, fine the EU firm for circumventing the rules. Hard? Yes. Impossible? No.

[peoplewindow]

From the perspective of the US company, then it's not them getting fined so not their problem. And if the EU wants to fine its own companies for buying adverts, they can go right ahead and do that. Doesn't seem very practical for the local economy though.

[tripzilch]

Yeah but there's many other, compliant, ways to advertise so they'll just do that instead.