France Proposes Consideration of Tax On Data Taken Out of EU

An anonymous reader writes "France has proposed the European Union study taxing companies for transferring personal data outside of the bloc ... The proposal is part of a series France has made ahead of an EU summit next month ... Both transfers of data inside companies, such as sending information on employees from a European subsidiary to a non-EU parent, and between companies are affected. Transfer of personal data often happens when companies outsource certain tasks such as customer sales and help lines to offshore call centres."

Comments

Enforcement

[Hypotensive]

To enforce this you would need to inspect the contents of encrypted communications. On the same scale as the NSA inspects communications metadata.

Re:Enforcement

[ShanghaiBill]

To enforce this you would need to inspect the contents of encrypted communications.

Not necessarily. Instead, you could offer financial incentives for disgruntled employees to rat on the companies they work for.

Re:Enforcement

[i kan reed]

Or, it'll be like most laws, and enforcement will be on discovery of violation, and depend on the human element.

Re:Enforcement

[SJHillman]

Any time we look to China for a superior product, we really should take a step back and think twice about what we're doing.

Re:Enforcement

[NatasRevol]

Like paper & gunpowder & printing & i-dont-know the fucking fork?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions

Re:Enforcement

[Barsteward]

i think its more targeted at the global companies like Google, Amazon etc who do their level best to avoid paying local taxes and don;t necessarily have a large physical presence on the ground. I'm sure Google et al would not to exit any country of france's size.

Logical

[Anonymous Coward]

Since users are the product, import/export taxes should apply...

Brilliant

[holophrastic]

I like it. Yes enforcement would be tough, but that's a totally separate thing. This supports privacy but it does much more than that. It supports actually being able to make laws. It's less about "transfer" and more about transfering outside of the legal jurisdiction.

More importantly, it attributes real value to personal data. That makes sense today, since it's sold as a currency already.

Totally Unworkable

[brunes69]

So when you work in America and you manage employees in the UK, you now can't know any personal details on them without paying tax? How do you manage their salary? Their vacation time? How do they request parental leave? Now what - this is all hands off, with some kind of delegate relationship? How do you run your business this way.

Do you know how common this kind of setup is in any multi-national corporation? Reporting chains are not restricted to single countries.

This kind of thinking is very isolationist.

Re:Totally Unworkable

[holophrastic]

They are currently set up for their own profit. One of the only reasons that they go "multi-national" in the first place is to dodge tax laws.

But to your question specifically, you can easily have the heads of each country manage vacation schedules.

I don't think you realize that "outsourcing" means exporting a country's wealth. France is a particularly good example here, because it's very socialist in an amazingly family-friendly manner -- way beyond what you probably think is possible. Forget healthcare, hospitals will re-imburse you for your cabfare on-the-spot.

A society with that much wealth, literally paying its citizens with money and services leaps and bounds beyond just about anywhere else in the world, hasn't any hope in hell of competing when it comes to labour rates. So if you choose to live, work, or do business in a place that pays its citizens top-dollar, you can't be allowed to then stop paying anyone, take the country's money, and use it to pay peanuts to far-away peoples. If you are, you might as well just shut the country down now.

And that's the point. The people living there prefer the higher wages, and the better services. That's why they live there. No one's forced to live there. And no one's forced to work there. So this is all cool.

Re:Totally Unworkable

[Sique]

You got the idea. It's a disincentive for companies to have them manage personal data outside of the jurisdiction of people the data is about (which makes it nearly impossible or at least very expensive and cumbersome for said people to go to court about that data). Yes, you can still do it, but it comes at a price. And the company has to consider if it's worth it.

Re:Totally Unworkable

[garyebickford]

unelected boards of corporations

Technically, having an elected board is a characteristic of most types of corporations. Generally the board is elected by a 'one share = one vote" election, although there are other arrangements, such as one class of shares having more votes - common in family-run corporations. In some countries (Germany for one), the unions and the local governments even have representatives on the board.

In recent decades there has been an unfortunate dearth of investors (largely institutions and funds these days) not actually using their voting power to significantly influence management, but that seems to be changing in the last few years. There are even funds that sell to 'green' or other single-issue investors, that vote according to their principals.

If you mean, "unelected by my local fellow citizens", then true. The number and scope of unintended consequences of doing that would be huge. In fact this French thing is actually a fairly good example by analogy.

Re:data protection in the EU

[Flavianoep]

That and it's a jobs bill. Hard to consolidate your data centers out of country if that's illegal. Need in-country monkeys to run those boxes!

Who said that transferring data should or would be illegal. EU citizen have to pay tax on sales, is ever sales illegal?

Re:that's what caused the problem, TFA says

[Errol backfiring]

YES. And then have a corrupt taxation authority, like in the Netherlands, that you can make "special deals" with. This guarantees that you will not suffer from competition by pesky small companies.