Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is • Hacker News Board

Re: Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is

#51

Post by enedil » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

Sir_Substance wrote: post #32

danso wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many users do you think are like you? Especially in the number of plugins?

Here's #2 running a pretty similar cocktail (ublock origin, umatrix, privacy badger, httpseverywhere, cookie autodelete and decentraleyes). There's dozens of us! Dozens! But more seriously, there's actually lots of us. You don't hear about us because we don't narcissistically post about it on facebook. We just block shitty software and move on with our lives. I have no stats for you though, because stats are usually…

Yes, I do it too - I have ublock orogin, privacy badger and httpseverywhere. I do it because the web is faster without ads and trackers. Just look at devtools and see how much time is saved by blocking requests.

Re: Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is

#52

Post by freehunter » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

feedmeseymour wrote: post #15

mlinksva wrote: post #3

> Today, for instance, we see that a majority of people who install an ad blocker don't actually do it to block ads (that's just an added bonus). They are actually doing it to block tracking. Is there any evidence for this at all?

Every person I know that uses an ad blocker (5, including myself) does it to prevent tracking. In fact, I want to white list certain websites (a dozen or so) to continue seeing ads, but I don’t want to because I know that they are likely using Google for their ads and I don’t want Google’s little grabbling hands tracking me.

So 5 people out of how many million? Just Adblock Plus on Chrome has over 10,000,000 installs, and "most" of 10,000,000 is a big number. Even bigger when you say "not using it for ad blocking"

Re: Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is

#53

Post by srj » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #14

GDPR articles seem to be getting some traction on HN as everyone is trying to figure out: "Do I need to do something for this? Is so, what?" For a recent project I read (and translated to plain english) [1] every single article in the GDPR legislation and for our purposes it can be summed up as: "Treat user data like names and emails as if they were credit card numbers" AKA: be paranoid about keeping them, encrypt th…

If I have an IRC service that shows quotes from people and has 'last seen' functionality is that covered by GDPR? Some of the users are from EU countries, does that mean those features need to be turned off or have some sort of acceptance exchange with users?

Would filtering out EU IP ranges be sufficient, or does this also apply to EU citizens traveling outside of the EU?

The referenced page says that asking users to provide a birth date isn't sufficient proof that they're over 16 years of age, how should one verify age for something like an IRC bot?

Re: Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is

#54

Post by detaro » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 6:31 PM UTC

ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #46

Assuming I understand this correctly GDPR basically make products like Mixpanel’s JavaScript (browser loaded) library and other similar products from other companies unusable since they are oftn setup to collect data (including IP addresses) on first visit. Adblockers make the data collected incomplete even if this wasn’t an issue.

If these products don't take steps to be GDPR-compliant themselves they are going to be unusable, yes. Which is why I assume most of them will do in some form.

E.g. an analytics product does not have to collect IPs. I've seen one company in the field requiring customers to explicitly mark form fields as safe for tracking the contents of in session replay (so they don't accidentally end up with your customer addresses, while still allowing you to see how far people went with the signup process, which product options they had selected), ...

Re: Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is

#55

Post by raquo » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

mlinksva wrote: post #3

> Today, for instance, we see that a majority of people who install an ad blocker don't actually do it to block ads (that's just an added bonus). They are actually doing it to block tracking. Is there any evidence for this at all?

Personally, I use adblocker for both purposes, but if not for tracking, I would be disabling it on many more websites to support them.

Re: Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is

#56

Post by mixedbit » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #45

AlfeG wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is a lot of other PID with this visit - ip address, cookies, browser fingerprint

Noob question How is that person-identitifying information? Seems like it's machine-identifying information. You can't tie it to a real-world name and email (which the top voted comment claims is the essence of GDPR).

You can tie such visit to a real person. For example, if this is a Facebook user, and your site includes resources from facebook.com, Facebook will know exactly which real person visited your site, and the user did not give you consent to share such info with Facebook.

Re: Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is

#57

Post by k__ » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 6:33 PM UTC

Why not do it like with cookies?

People are already used to accept these cookie policies, so why not just widen it to GDPR related stuff?

Also how much can be caught with "security" reasons?

Re: Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is

#58

Post by nopriorarrests » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 6:35 PM UTC

hexaz wrote: post #48

nopriorarrests wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I personally use uBlock and "cookie autodelete", which deletes cookies for all sites except the white-listed ones each 5 minutes, automatically. So if your interpretation is correct, and GDPR affects even completely anonymous users, I'll be seeing and clicking "consent box" each time I go read a newspaper or just do general browsing. Like the "we use cookies" stuff, but on steroids. EDIT: but still, I fi…

You can display ads, just not personalized ones. Might even lead to more static image or text based ads, which have a higher chance of not being blocked by users

>You can display ads, just not personalized ones

Well, it's 2018, and most publishers rely on some 3rd party ad-tech to serve the ads. They don't have direct contracts with advertisers, and definitely has no tech in house. If 3rd party calls are prohibited, their ad revenue disappears overnight.

Will be interesting to see how it develops.

Re: Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is

#59

Post by molf » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #57

Why not do it like with cookies? People are already used to accept these cookie policies, so why not just widen it to GDPR related stuff? Also how much can be caught with "security" reasons?

There's a very clear distinction: GDPR requires that consent is not a precondition for offering a service.

Most cookie policies in practice are all or nothing: you either accept and continue, or you decline and cannot use the service/website. That is not allowed under GDPR.

Re: Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is

#60

Post by always_good » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 6:41 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #7

What if I told you... (Morpheus photo) 1. Social websites don’t have to be giant, centralized communities too big to police themselves. 2. People need more tools to help them achieve things in the real world, rather than spending hours a day chatting about the real world online. 3. There are ways to make money online without ads begging you to click on them, and they involve real-world goods and services that your we…

>There are ways to make money online without ads begging you to click on them, and they involve real-world goods and services that your website can help connect people for?

Not every website is in a position to sell something directly. That's how ads work in the first place.

I run a collaborative writing forum that is predominantly used by teens. I make so little money off it that I'm running it as a charity because forums like it were a valuable part of my youth. And there's very little I can do to make money from my userbase these days, though it used to make a couple thousand bucks per month and got me through uni.

People on HN and the like love to scoff and go "if you can't make money, then you don't deserve to exist" which is awfully short sighted. Like the only consequence they can think of as they Mr Burns their hands together is The Verge, operated by a billion dollar company, shutting down.

Ads service the middle of the bellcurve of sites that aren't 100% charity but also not in a position to peddle you merchandise. The internet is going to lose out if society doesn't find an alternative. Just more centralization.