Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is

baekdal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 468 posts

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

#311

Post by x0x0 »

Kelbit wrote: post #304
downandout wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the best thing to do if you don’t have a high percentage of EU users/customers is to simply block EU IPs. First it was the completely useless cookie notifications, now it’s GDPR, and nobody knows what the next thing will be - we only know that there will be a next thing (there always is), and that it too will be costly and burdensome to comply with. Unless you derive a significant percentage of your revenue…

The EU has a population of over half a billion people and a GDP per capita of $41k PPP (although those numbers will shrink a little bit post-Brexit). Ignoring Europe as a potential market ignores half the western world - and it is westerners, for the most part, who have disposable income to spend money on goods and services. Ignore Europe if you like. Just be aware that you are allowing your competitors to gain an un…

For most American pubs - and hence producing English language content -- there's very little risk. Most of the EU won't read it anyway, and if the uk privacy regulator wants to complain, let them.

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

#312

Post by ec109685 »

Rjevski wrote: post #246

My takeaway from the whole GDPR craze is that if you respect your users and have some ethics as to how you process their data then you don't have much to worry about to begin with. If you are an asshole that's trying to get as much data off your users in order to resell them to the highest bidder, share it with "partners" (partners in crime that is), or to advertise/spam them with shit they don't need, then frankly y…

Do you have any citations for this belief? The law is pretty explicit that you need consent to collect data from users, they need to be able to view what you collected and they need to be able to delete it.

Are you hoping that nobody notices that you aren’t complying?

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

#313

Post by x0x0 »

molf wrote: post #73
mstolpm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d add: Get (documented, active) permission of users to store and use their data, understand that permission is given only for a defined cause/usage (and not indefinitely for everything you right now might not even think of), be prepared to tell users what data you store about them, why and (briefly) how it is used. Be prepared to delete user data on request. Be prepared to show documentation on how you handle the (…

Be careful with hiding everything behind "consent", because consent cannot be a precondition for providing a service. Put differently: if a user does not consent, you cannot refuse them the service if the data you wanted to collect is not strictly necessary to provide the service. The alternative is to only collect data that is strictly necessary to provide the service. In that case GDPR allows you to collect the dat…

Right, but that means you have to have some mix of legitimate interests and consent, and makes this whole thing an expensive exercise, both in terms of code and legal time. If you have an ad supported service, this is going to be painful.

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

#314

Post by x0x0 »

nopriorarrests wrote: post #98
molf wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful with hiding everything behind "consent", because consent cannot be a precondition for providing a service. Put differently: if a user does not consent, you cannot refuse them the service if the data you wanted to collect is not strictly necessary to provide the service. The alternative is to only collect data that is strictly necessary to provide the service. In that case GDPR allows you to collect the dat…

It raises interesting question. What if some publisher, say, newspaper, can show highly targeted ads for $3 CPM, or generic ads for $1 CPM. Can such publisher claim that collecting data is strictly necessary to provide the service? With threefold difference in ad revenue, that could be actually the case.

I do wonder if you can charge a consent price and a non-consent price, or if that would be fundamentally equivalent to not providing the service?

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

#315

Post by TeMPOraL »

gonmf wrote: post #77

"If you look at what is happening around us, you can see very clear signals that the public has had enough." No, outside of a few echo chambers, no one cares about privacy or knows what GDPR is. Until GDPR shows everyday on the evening news for weeks it will not be well-known, and there are many things more important to most people than online privacy. Heck, Cambridge Analytica was only a scandal because the "bad guy…

> Until GDPR shows everyday on the evening news for weeks it will not be well-known

I think we've crossed that point few months ago in Europe. Last year I felt I was probably the only one of my real-life friends who even knew what GDPR was. These days, I see streams of articles about it on social media, aimed at non-technical people. Hell, last week my SO told me she started receiving GDPR-related e-mails at work from companies that are in business with her place.

I feel people do know. Unfortunately, I also fear they only think of it as yet another random EU regulation thing, and not realize the benefits it'll bring.

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

#316

Post by kuschku »

merinowool wrote: post #271
kuschku wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Relevant ads also save users (the segment that buys stuff from ads) time from researching for products and services. That is specifically not wanted. Several European governments are subsidizing projects to provide consistent and exhaustive comparison tests between many products instead, so customers can for each category of product they may need find massive comparison tables, find which products fulfill their nee…

So is that going to be another parcel of life under the state control? It is easy to predict such tools are going to be abused (for example excluding products from a producer that has opposite political views to the currently ruling people)

Every company today that you rely on to discover products will shape what you see for their own advantage.

Google puts their own ads more prominently and bans competitors from certain ad spaces, Amazon does the same, as does even Yahoo.

And your worst fear is that maybe the government might end up just as bad as the companies that you see as alternative?

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

#317

Post by TeMPOraL »

merb wrote: post #167
eyeareque wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dream of the day that I can ask various companies to delete every piece of data they have about me.

and you really think that they will? you pretty sure will get the following response: ok -- hidden in their database -- (date_deleted = now()) fixed.

That's exactly what GDPR is for - I can be somewhat sure they'll delete it, and and if I'm wrong and they do what you described, I'll laugh hard as they bleed money when discovered.

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

#318

Post by mulmen »

downandout wrote: post #302
diamondlovesyou wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehhhh, I'd leave it as is. Unless you have business licenses in EU countries, EU laws have no legal authority over you. If you do have such licenses, then you're probably big enough to foot the bill and possibly also can't afford to not foot the bill (due to suspended licenses). This privacy thing is, like, their option, man. Even if you and I agree with the EU.

I’ve been looking into this, as I run several sites myself, and apparently this isn’t true. They can go after you even if you have no EU presence, and US courts will domesticate any EU judgment against you for fines levied under it.

Do you have a source on this? Seems like a major concern if true.

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

#319

Post by TeMPOraL »

merinowool wrote: post #258
molf wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GDPR intends to protect businesses from "denial of service attacks" through sending many repetitive or bogus requests. A single, legitimate request is definitely not excessive.

So if you get 100000 individual requests is that going to be excessive? There are people organising already to send such requests to various sites.

Unless your PII workflow is bonkers, you should be able to respond to those letters in mostly automated fashion.

I mean, you do handle your data in mostly universal way, instead of randomly copying pieces of your database to random parties? Right?

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

#320

Post by TeMPOraL »

vilmosi wrote: post #241
dbg31415 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They shouldn't have to feed information to Google -- they just need to look at the logs on their servers. Y'know... the way we did it before Google Analytics came along.

There's an entire industry around parsing logs though. Even "big data" companies outsource their log parsing. Requiring every website to create graphs and stats from log files is not practical, especially with websites that don't have a constant developer on it. Think blogs, recipe websites, restaurants. Google Analytics provides an insanely good value for them and it's a good thing. It's not like pre Google Analytic…

Why do you need those stats anyway?

It's not like your webmaster is load-balancing your cluster using Google Analytics feed. Let webmasters use tools for webmasters, and get rid of the marketing crap.

Post reply on HN