Are google Reviews consider to be proof against owners of business? I Want to be honest international students are treated very badly in Germany, I was learning in educational institutions and I was treated badly very rude staff and doesn't answer emails if you want to share opinions and truth online you will get threats from these institutions and such. and if you want to talk to them they will only talk with you alone so they can deny any statement later on. I thought I was the only one until many many other international students from different places said the same. So in an attempt to collect proof against my place I archived and screenshot many negative reviews before they are forced to be deleted, and all of them have replies from these institutions which is proof this review and statements were made by real students in my college for example, the most common thing these students complain about is why they never got their deposit back and how the director is taking advantage of them so are these online reviews consider a proof of any kind?
Any google review would be hearsay. That means, it would be proof that someone posted a review, and what was written in the review, but it wouldn't be proof that any facts claimed in the review were true. As it is proof of posting, anyone who feels slandered could sue for slander and be successful (depending on circumstances). But trying to claim that the contents of a review is a true fact will fail. You can of course try to contact the person writing a review, and they might be willing to appear in court as a witness. That would make it a statement by a witness which would be taken seriously, and not just hearsay. Since lying in a court as a witness is a serious matter, someone posting a false review will very likely not be willing to appear in court for you.
I'm pretty sure that under GDPR, you can indeed request them to send all data they have on you. If it's a complex request, they may charge you something like £10. If they have a lot of data on you, they may list the categories of data they have and ask you to pick one, rather than them having to collect and send everything. They should respond within one month, but iirc in the UK implementation, they can inform you (within that month) that they will respond within three months instead. For the rest, I only know current Dutch law. GDPR is not that different from what we already had (in general terms) and in many cases it even extends it. Under our law (WBP), you can also request a correction of the data in case it is incorrect, or deletion if they no longer need it for the purpose for which it was collected and stored. I don't really know how that works out in practice though, as Facebook can of course claim that "being able to connect you to your friends when you sign up for WhatsApp or Facebook with that number" is a legitimate purpose (in their eyes). They might also not have your full name and therefore not be able to connect your data to your request. Or, perhaps, they have only your full name (and there are probably more people with your name), so they'll have a hard time verifying that it's really your data which they would be handing over or deleting. The company is required to verify your identity before acting on your request. How they implement that is up to them. Under Dutch law, if I remember correctly, any data that can be connected to your person by any party is personally identifiable information (PII). While Facebook might not be able to find who's behind a phone number, your carrier most certainly can. Therefore, the data falls under PII protection laws and they will have to implement a way to verify you and get you your data. Finally, whether your local laws apply to Facebook, I don't know exactly. There's lots of information on this though, so you should be able to find it. Generally, countries say that if something happened within their territory (e.g. you signed up for WhatsApp while in the UK), their law applies. Companies, I've read, will instead try to claim that their main office is in SomeCountry and therefore SomeCountry's laws apply. But I'm pretty sure you'll be able to find a Facebook office somewhere where GDPR applies, so that's probably fine. While not an exact answer and while I am not sure about everything, I hope this gave you some pointers to go on!
I'm not aware of any cases on point, but as a rule legal fig-leaves don't play well in court. If the webmaster simply puts up a banner saying that EU residents are not permitted but takes no other action to exclude them, then that is going to be considered irrelevant. The webmaster is still very likely required to comply with the GDPR. On the other hand if the webmaster takes other steps to exclude EU residents, such as using a geolocation service to block connections known to be in the EU, validating email addresses and blocking those from EU domains, and ejecting anyone who mentions that their residence is in the EU, then that is more likely to be seen as a good-faith attempt to avoid being subject to the GDPR. It will also have the practical effect of greatly reducing the number of actual EU residents. All these controls can be evaded, but it would be much harder for any data subjects to claim that they acted in good faith or that the webmaster acted in bad faith. Note that validating an email address or logging an IP is itself processing of personal data, so anyone implementing such a system still can't ignore the GDPR completely, but it would greatly limit the scope and make it easy to delete any such data after a short time. (Note: the term &quot;EU resident&quot; above is an approximation of the territorial scope).
No, the result of an exam is not actionable. The court could only make a decision whether legal proceedings were met. However, the grader’s decision whether a particular answer (and thus the overall exam’s result) was correct or incorrect is not legal in nature. There is no German law saying “1 + 1 = 2”. Therefore, the court could not make a ruling on that, nor is it really their task to do so. Similarly, it is not the court’s (or the legal system’s) responsibility to ensure a certain share of students pass the exam. […] 93% not passing is just absurd. Welcome to Germany. Such exams did and do exist. I refer you to the local student’s body (specifically the Fachschaft). They will advocate for (future) students, especially if there are “design flaws” with the class to be found. Unfortunately, if it’s the “examiner’s fault”, there are no other options than finding an amicable solution. Sometimes, students change universities just to pass a certain module.
Defamation laws do not distinguish between charitable organizations and others: however, in the US there are special considerations for "public figures" (they are not afforded as much protection). The medium does not matter -- texting, blogging, letter-writing, whatever. The defamatory statement need not have been received by a wide audience – it suffices that the message was received by one person other than the person being defamed. A single defamatory act is all it takes: there is no requirement of there being an established and repeated practice of defaming. One way to defend against a charge of defamation is to show that the statement is true. An alternative is to show that the statement is incapable of being proven true or false (e.g. calling someone a "jerk" doesn't assert a factual proposition). A careful scrutiny of the actual statement, performed by an attorney specializing in such matters, is really the only way to know whether words like "may", "possibly" would make a statement an expression of opinion rather than a statement of fact. A person suing for defamation would have to have suffered a loss, but there is a category of false statements, per se defamation, considered to be so injurious that damage need not be proven. That included allegations of criminal activity and allegations of professional incompetence, either of which could be applicable in the context you are describing. The First Amendment provides much protection against such suits, which may not exist in other countries. Because of this, a law was recently passed in the US, 28 USC 111, which says that domestic courts will not enforce a foreign defamation judgment that is inconsistent with the First Amendment. [Addendum] This part is crucial: "The only people I've expressed my concerns to, aside from the organization itself, is my parents and my wife's parents. However, they have shared with a few friends...". If you alleged illegal behavior to your parents, that's a problem. If you only said e.g. "I have concerns", that's not a problem. It would also matter in what way you tried "to disclose to a U.S. based organization details of the foreign organization they are supporting that indicate it might not be on the up and up".
Your VPN scenario is why you have to show the banner to everyone. If you somehow knew beyond any doubt that someone was not in the EU, then you would not have to show a banner, but because you can't verify that, you should always show the banner. Doing so also protects against accidentally violating a similar law in another country; the GDPR is the best-known privacy law, but it is far from the only one. It's good practice to ask for people's permission before collecting their information anyway.
You seem to have a solid understanding of the ePrivacy implications, but lack a fundamental insight: your organization does not have a right to achieve its mission or a right to disseminate unwanted marketing. But other people do have a right to not be subject to excessive marketing. Of course, reality is more complex, so it's probably not entirely impossible to do marketing. In your point 1, you note that some EU/EEA/UK countries distinguish ePrivacy protections between consumer and business subscribers. You can research the exact rules in the potential customer's country. This may allow you to email corporate/business accounts. I would strongly advise against messaging via Linkedin if there is a chance that the person is using that account for personal purposes like networking or hunting jobs, not just for conducting official company business. ePrivacy has markedly different rules for email marketing vs phone marketing. Whereas there are pretty strict rules for electronic messages and robocalls, manual cold calling can be OK from an ePrivacy perspective. However, many EU/EEA/UK countries have rules that go beyond ePrivacy, and may have a kind of do-not-call registry that you must respect. Of course manual calls take more effort than spamming emails, but recall the above point that you don't have a right to spam other people. Phone calls are probably the most appropriate approach when the company lists individuals' phone numbers on its website. This will at least give you a few seconds of attention with a real human, more than you can expect from an email that is likely to be caught by spam filters. Marketing via physical mail tends to have very lax rules. Note that every company/business that has a website will have to disclose its contact details including an address there, so this information is easy to acquire. However, chances are low that anyone would seriously engage with that marketing. You can consider alternatives to direct marketing, so that interested companies eventually come to you. Things like press releases, writing guest articles in industry publications, speaking at relevant conferences, working on search engine optimization, buying ads. On the GPDR aspects: GDPR and ePrivacy overlap, and it is necessary to comply with both sets of rules (GDPR likely applies here via Art 3(2)(a)). But where they potentially contradict each other, ePrivacy as the more specific law has precedence. For example, ePrivacy overrides the default GDPR legal basis rules when it comes to email marketing to existing customers (opt-out basis, no consent needed) or to using cookies (needs consent unless strictly necessary). Information that relates to corporations is not personal data, but information that relates to individual employees or to sole proprietors would typically be personal data. Since you are unlikely to obtain consent for using this data, you would need an alternative GDPR legal basis such as a &quot;legitimate interest&quot;. Relying on a legitimate interest requires that you conduct a balancing test, weighing your interests like marketing against the recipient's interests, rights, and freedoms. Core question in this context is whether the data subject can reasonably expect their personal data to be used like this, taking into account the nature of their relationship with you. Since there is no pre-existing relationship, claims of a legitimate interest are weak to start with. However, it may be possible to argue that when a company makes employee contact details available via its website (not LinkedIn!) then relevant marketing can be reasonably expected. I would rather not rely on such arguments, though.
Is this actually true? Not really although there may be figments of truth woven in. First, the GDPR does not prevent tax authorities from determining layers of corporate ownership or investigating tax fraud. Second, your substantive tax liability depends upon the tax laws of the countries in question. If you owe taxes under a country's tax laws but the country can't find it, that makes you a tax criminal, and doesn't mean you don't owe the tax. Third, the exact rules on what triggers tax liability in mixed country fact patterns are highly technical and not fully uniform. If you actually do business abroad within the meaning of a country's tax laws in a way that is not subject to its taxes, then it is legal. But this scheme probably doesn't meet that standard under most country's tax laws. So you hire two local directors, as contractors, from country B. On the contract signed, they oversee the day to day operations and work for you as advisor since you're the only shareholder. So their existence, the contract and the structure show that the company is managed in country B, run in country B and has economic substance in country B. This way the offshore company isn't taxed in country A. This allows you to get dividends from the company tax free (after paying corporate taxes in country B) to your account in country A. A few thoughts on this specific example. If you truly are nothing but a passive source of funding for a company, then owning shares in this company is no different from owning shares in a public held company (e.g. BMW). The notion that dividends from the company are tax free in county A in that situation is very likely incorrect. Usually, dividends and other intangible income is taxable income in the country where they are received. Most likely, the dividends are income subject to taxation in country A. There is a concept in tax law which U.S. tax lawyers call the &quot;Economic Substance Rule&quot; which is also true, but with different names (most of these countries don't have English language tax terminology anyway) which means that when someone is going through the motions of conducting a transaction in a tax favored form when in substance, something different is really going on, the tax authorities can choose to tax the substance rather than the form of the transaction. So, if the really valuable work is being done by the shareholder without visible compensation, rather than by the local directors and managers, you the shareholder might be taxed on &quot;imputed income&quot; representing the fair market value of the services rendered, or treated as the true manager of the company in country B. Similar issues can arise when valuable intellectual property is transferred to the company without being duly reflected in a fair market value purchase of equity interests, a sale at fair market value, or a licensing agreement for royalty payments. Tax officials aren't limited to looking at paperwork. They can and do interview the human beings involved in interviews that those human beings are legally obligated to attend and cooperate with and to provide truthful information in with legal consequences for lying in those interviews. Even if no official documentation or public statements would tip off tax officials, a significant share of tax evasion cases are driven by whistleblowing by disgruntled former employees, ex-spouses, jilted significant others, mistreated business partners, and revengeful angry children who feel that they have been mistreated by their parents. Nothing in the GDPR prevents whistleblowing to tax authorities. Background In E.U. countries, closely held company ownership must be declared and recorded in a notary public's &quot;public records&quot; or a corporate register (unlike, for example, the United States, where, this information was only contained in the internal records of the company in most cases, although a new law called the Corporate Transparency Act effective January 1, 2022, or later if initial regulations aren't adopted, changes this status quo). E.U. directives expressly requires much more public disclosure by private companies than the U.S. more generally. For example, a recent Dutch overhaul of its rules for disclosing beneficial ownership of companies is a model of contemporary modern European legislation on the subject. This affords access to this information as follows (UBO is the Universal Beneficial Ownership registry and FIO is the Fiscal Intelligence Agency, an anti-money laundering agency): The public can only access the publicly accessible UBO-information with a valid registration and in exchange for a fixed fee. The identity of those persons that access the UBO-register will be registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce and UBOs may inquire as to how often their information has been consulted. The Chamber of Commerce may register the Citizen Service Number (Burgerservicenummer) of persons who access the register. The FIU and other competent authorities will, upon request, have access to that information. The FIU and other competent authorities may perform a search in the UBO-register based on the name of an individual, thus listing all connections of that individual, while the public will only be able to search the UBO-register for the UBO(s) of a specific entity (and not for the name of an individual). Even though this limitation to search options was presented as a measure to protect the privacy of UBOs, it is generally expected that commercial platforms that register company information will enable searches based on the name of individuals. The FIU and competent authorities have access to both the publicly and not publicly accessible UBO-information. In the Netherlands, the following institutions are, amongst others, qualified as competent authorities with unlimited access to the UBO-information: the Dutch Central Bank; the Authority for the Financial Markets; the Financial Supervision Office; the Dutch Gaming Authority; the Tax &amp; Customs Authorities; the National Police; the Public Prosecutor’s Office; the Dutch intelligence agencies; and the Tax Intelligence Agency. As this example illustrates, taxing authorities are given express statutory authority to gather information pertinent to tax collection. The Dutch situation, prior to the recent reform, collected essentially similar information, but at a decentralized basis in the offices of the notary handling the incorporation of the entity in question, with similar parties having access to the information. The E.U.'s General Data Protection Regulation generally, affirmatively extends to the provision of a good or service to an E.U. person subject to the regulation, something that would not include tax collection. See Article 3(2). Also, mutual assistance treaty obligations between E.U. countries to share information, which would include many tax treaties between E.U. countries, and criminal investigations (which would include criminal tax fraud cases) are expressly exempted from its scope.