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by TomasEkeli 896 days ago
could you please explain what those abbreviations mean? I know GDPR, but the rest are obscure to me.
1 comments

NOYB: "None of Your Business", it's the site being linked. They're a customer rights activist group led by Max Schrems whose self-declared job appears to be "drag every business in the world to the attention of the DPAs to make sure they're both compliant and don't do any funny business with the GDPR".

DPA: Data Protection Authority. They're local to each EU country (including those that aren't full Member States but do follow EU laws) and it's their job to enforce the GDPR at a country level. Usually they're a government department. The one you hear the most in the context of GAFAM enforcement is the Irish one, which is infamously underequipped and overburdened because GAFAM has lobbied the Irish government to not take enforcement seriously so all GAFAM companies can put their EU headquarters there (which permits them to only have to comply with the Irish DPA, something called the "one-stop shop" solution.)

CJEU: Court of Justice of the European Union. Think SCOTUS but for the EU. While technically the CJEU doesn't operate on the concept of precedent (its main job is enforcing that Member States follow EU laws and directives correctly), their interpretations of EU law are the final interpretation of those laws. Usually once a case has gone through a DPA and isn't resolved satisfactorily (or isn't complied with), it ends up before CJEU. GAFAM has dragged basically all enforcement cases before CJEU to drag out the process.

GAFAM: An abbreviation referring to the five largest American tech giants: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft. Usually is used as a shorthand for the "big tech" side of the IT industry.

Interesting, how many of the 100s of newspapers in the EU that are doing exactly the same thing as Facebook has he dragged into court for doing it? They've been doing it for a lot longer. I do see some cases against Conde Nast, but that's not for this behavior.

I do think it's good though when somebody will go and try to take the most extreme position of some law so that the lawmakers will maybe realize that they got it wrong.

With Google->Alphabet and Facebook->Meta, we can now use MAAAM instead.
I personally would prefer MAMAA instead