More likely: the wrong answer would've shut out a profitable market rather than the practice. The EU is not the world. Anthropic seems to not mind blocking the EU for example.
1) At the time, the European data laws implied that it protected its citizens no matter where they are. Nobody wanted to be the first to test that in court.
2) The organizations and agencies performing this type of data modeling were often doing so on behalf of large multinational organizations with absurd advertising spends, so they were dealing with Other People’s Data. The responsibility of scrubbing it clean of EU citizen data was unclear.
What this meant was that an EU tourist who traveled to the US, and got served a targeted ad, could make a RTBF request to the advertiser (think Coca-Cola, Nestle or Unilever)
1) At the time, the European data laws implied that it protected its citizens no matter where they are. Nobody wanted to be the first to test that in court.
2) The organizations and agencies performing this type of data modeling were often doing so on behalf of large multinational organizations with absurd advertising spends, so they were dealing with Other People’s Data. The responsibility of scrubbing it clean of EU citizen data was unclear.
What this meant was that an EU tourist who traveled to the US, and got served a targeted ad, could make a RTBF request to the advertiser (think Coca-Cola, Nestle or Unilever)
The whole thing was a mess.