Hetzner is trying to charge me for Bandwidth overuse and will not respond when I use the contact form A few months ago, I was using Hetzner Cloud for my VPS, and they blocked a server because someone seems to have DDoSed it. I requested it to be unblocked, and they ignored me. I also noticed they are trying to charge me about €50 for bandwidth overuse, which my bank is blocking. I am now banned from the Console, and cannot delete my account because I have "unpaid products". I have contacted Hetzner's support email, and they proceed to tell me that they require me to use the Contact Form on the Hetzner Robot Dashboard (and that I should be able to delete my account), and then they ignore me. I contacted them numerous times 3 months ago, and now I try every few weeks. Nothing changes. I'm not a lawyer. Is this illegal? Can I report them to the GDPR authorities for not allowing me to delete my account. I will not pay a €50 fee because some random guy decided to DDoS me.
They provide a snail- and e-mail way to end the contract here. This will not eradicate the €50 that they say you owe, but you can sort that out separately. That email address might also respond to inquiries about the validity of the charge. At any rate, they also give a link to online dispute resolution per Art. 14, para 1 of the EU Online Dispute Resolution Regulations. GDPR does not give one the right to be deleted so as to avoid an existing liability.
Can't we get a legal action about AdBlocker as web masters? No. I assume that by "web master" you mean a server admin who contracts with entities which are seeking to advertise their goods and services. An advertiser pays the server to transmit (or send(), in terms of a socket API) certain content to whoever submits a GET or POST request ("the client"). The scope of the contract ends there, and the end consumer or client is not a party to that contract. Any point beyond the server admin's routers, it is perfectly lawful for end users to run some program on the client side where the purpose of that program is to (1) parse any packets received in the client socket, (2) filter out some of it, (3) and forward the rest to a browser. Bringing legal action against AdBlocker would be somewhat akin to suing producers of TV remote controls under the allegation that the mute button functionality blocks advertisement content.
You could certainly allow twitter to delete the exchange, unless it is part of some record that the law in the relevant country require to be retained, which would be quite unusual. That would depend on the nature of the exchange, and the particular law requiring that records be retained. However, if the request is to be able to demand that Twitter delete the exchange, that would be much harder. In general a person or business is entitled to retain copies of communications, such as emails, sent to that person or entity. There is the &quot;right to be forgotten&quot; which applies under EU law, but that would not apply to records which a business needed to retain for its own legitimate purposes, and was not posting publicly, as I understand it. In any case Twitter is not an EU business, so I am not sure if the right would apply at all. (Twitter has an office in Amsterdam, so teh GDPR and other EU law clearly applies to it.) There might be some other basis on which such a demand could be made, depending on the detailed circumstances and the specific jurisdiction, but I cannot think of one offhand.
Could I get into legal trouble for this? No. Relax. Your three emails are very unlikely to cause a data privacy professor to feel harassed. Just move on regardless of whether he replies at all. Don't keep sending another email just because the recipient has not replied to your previous one. As for the issue that prompted you to start emailing the professor, what everyone else has told you is correct. And the other email user is unlikely to take court action for something like this. The effort and cost of drafting &amp; filing suit, and then pursuing discovery would dissuade most people unless they are incurring actual losses (which is not the case with your messages). Just move on so that this other user also can move on.
No, there is no general publicly accessible directory of lawsuits against private individuals, even if it concerns yourself. The complaint must identify you as the defendant indicating a ladungsfähige Anschrift, § 253 Ⅱ, Ⅳ, 130 ZPO. Commencing an action requires service of process, § 253 Ⅰ ZPO. I presume you are not a De-Mail user. So you will get a hardcopy. You may not know that, but such mail in Germany is usually sent in yellow envelopes. The mailman will carefully compare the mailbox label and in case of a match record the date and time of successful delivery on the envelope as well as a slip of paper returned to the sender, the court in this case. Now this will obviously fail in your case (unless the landlord maliciously attached a corresponding label to a mailbox). In a civil action the court “pretends” to be dumb regarding facts. The landlord must try to track you down. Evidently he knew your email address, so he had some contact details. If he was evil, the next option would be to ask the court for an öffentliche Zustellung, § 185 ZPO. If the court agreed, this means there will be, for instance, in the city hall a paper on a bulletin board “To the attention of Coala, last known address …: There is mail for you to pick up at my office.” Two weeks later the letter is automatically considered to be delivered.Some cities (example: Cologne, NRW) also publish these documents on the internet, but due to GDPR considerations delete them after a certain period now. If there was a lawsuit, there will have been a default judgment by now, i.e. you will have lost just by being a no‑show. However, you said you have never received the bill. This means the landlord must have produced false evidence, claim to have sent the bill and a subsequent warning notice, but there was none. But this is an entirely different issue.
Can a moderation team in a game extend a ban that you have just because they want to TL;DR Yes and no. It's their platform and you broke the rules that you agreed to. Therefore, you forfeited your right to use the service for as long as they deem appropriate up to and including forever. In exercising this power they must act reasonably which, in the absence of anything in the contract (and I can't see anything) means that their response must be proportionate and offer you procedural fairness. It's possible that they haven't done this - it may even be likely. However, in order to have this overturned, clause 24 of the EULA requires you to take the dispute to arbitration. Clause 24.4 sets out how to initiate this.
If you operate from outside Germany but within the EU, it is generally sufficient to satisfy your own country's regulations. This is a foundational principle of the EU single market, though it's not quite realized yet and has exemptions for consumer protection purposes. However, the German TMG law which includes the Impressumspflicht explicitly enshrines this principle. So from the German Impressumspflicht perspective, you're good to go. However, you will not be able to operate anonymously, because of your country's laws. GDPR requires you to clearly state your identity and contact details in your privacy notice. If you engage in internet-based commerce, the EU eCommerce Directive will have caused your EU member state to pass legislation that requires you to disclose: your name the geographic address where you are established contact details incl an email address if applicable, registration numbers from trade registers or similar if applicable, your VAT ID Note that you must have a VAT ID for cross-border B2B sales within the EU. You state that you are not selling anything via your website, and are instead collecting payments via another website. What the consequences of this are would depend on the laws and caselaw in your jurisdiction, but you will have to make these disclosures on at least one of the two websites. About Germany going after bloggers who show ads: income from ads is taxable income, and operating a business requires registration. However, the German Impressumspflicht is rarely enforced by the state. Instead, other market participants (competitors) trawl the internet for potential violations and then send a cease-and-desist letter. They can do this because skirting legal obligations distorts the level playing field, which harms those competitors. There is a thriving cease-and-desist industry built around this, but it only affects businesses that operate within Germany.
The line they'll rely on for GDPR compliance is the first part of that sentence - "If you agree to this during the order process", which suggests that there will be a separate request to opt in to marketing communications at some other time in the process. Check any order documents. There's likely to be a tick box or similar on at least one. If that implies opting out rather than opting in there may be grounds to argue with that under GDPR, but there's nothing in the quoted text that suggests a problem.