alt Hacker NewsThey don't go on random personalist whims (so far!), but they also tend to be much less specific in a way that can frustrate US businesses. The GDPR definition of "personal data" is just a couple of lines long; the California definition of "personal information" lists out twelve categories, one of which is "sensitive personal information" with eight more categories.
There's a fundamentally different definition of how laws are supposed to work. EU law isn't a list of checkboxes that you can technically check while going counter to the spirit, it is a philosophical direction, the details of following it are up to you. The spirit matters, not the letter.
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...