Europeans just found out which US sites were tracking and profiling them.
GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
211–220 of 680 posts
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a webpage with text and iamges, no user accounts and subscriptions then why you prefer to block the users then load the page without tracking, and show some static ads,better then nothing. Showing a popup with things like -we have Google analytics that track you in this way -we have FB scripts that do this -we have ad company X script that tracks this -we have Y product that tracks your focus .... would a…
No, it's not better than nothing. In fact, it's worse than nothing. Which is why they're not doing that. It's extremely difficult for classic news media to make money in the internet-world. They're not tracking you because they hate privacy, they're tracking you because they need to show you ads to earn a few cents to pay for their newsroom.
No. They are tracking you because they are entirely oblivious to privacy and to the stuff they run on their websites.
A lot of those links and trackers and what-nots come from affiliate networks, or because some marketing manager said it would be better that way. And now they are suddenly alerted to the fact that they run 30+ trackers on their sites, and believe you me they have very vague idea about what those trackers are doing.
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#213On one hand I can understand why some orgs are having trouble with GDPR. On the other hand it’s pretty clear the actions of more than a few have gotten GDPR to where it is. My takeaway at the moment is something along the lines of this is why we can’t have nice things.
Businesses had plenty of time to prepare for it though.
Preparing for the GDPR and caring about the GDPR are two different things.
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true at all. It's really easy to build an MVP that complies with GDPR.
Really? Do you have an EU representative for your MVP? Did you hire a legal team to review your site and write up your terms of service? Send me your MVP and I’ll show you 10 thing a that are wrong with it and if you are complaint somehow then I doubt the product will be viable at all.
So my MVP is an imaginary service that does X for you. It charges $5/month and it uses your email as the log in. It captures no data other than what you give it to do said service. Other than good data practices which should be followed anyway, please described the huge GDPR hurdles that will make this service not viable.
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#215Alternatively there's this: https://eu.usatoday.com/ No ads, no tracking, no cookies, not even Javascript. Just plain HTML+CSS and JPEG images. The whole front page is around 650 KByte, and by far most of this is in the image files. As a result the page looks very clean and loads very fast. This is what all news web sites should look like, not just for EU readers (although I fear that this is just a temporary solutio…
That looks fantastic, I would actually read USA Today if this lean site sticks around. If they want to monetize, publishers should control their own generic ad inventory (like they used to in old pre internet days) and ask for opt-in if you want customization. Easy on paper but hard in reality.
"This site does not collect personally identifiable information or persistent identifiers from, deliver a personalized experience to, or otherwise track or monitor persons reasonably identified as visiting our Site from the European Union. We do identify EU internet protocol (IP) addresses for the purpose of determining whether to direct you to USA TODAY NETWORK’s EU Experience.
This site provides news and information of USA TODAY NETWORK. We hope you enjoy the site."
Colour me impressed. I sincerely hope it catches on.
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please respect our laws and privacy or don't do business with us. Stop sending us your data and money? I don’t leave the US to deal with EU customers. You send requests to my server in the US. If you’re unhappy with me, stop doing that. And it’s pretty rich to complain about companies not complying and leaving the market, while also using VPNs to use their service anyway. Apparently protecting your data isn’t as impo…
I haven't been given an option not to make calls to your servers, those websites used to load 20 tracking scripts without asking me. Thanks to the GDPR now I will be able to stop sending requests. What's the problem? See, how browsers work is that they load this thing called HTML that describes the content and can load other stuff without asking me. Apologies if I accidentally sent any data or money, it wasn't my cal…
If it’s your right to use an adblocker under the theory that you should control what requests your browser makes from your device, then which requests it makes are also your responsibility.
Regardless, whether you intended to send my server a request is your problem. The fact is that you did, and that hardly gives full control of my business to whatever legal jurisdictions claim you as their subject.
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#217Well we still have HN, even if non-compliant.
Why is HN non-compliant? They use Cloudflare which has gone out of their way to be compliant (to the point of offering US citizens and the rest of the world the same protections as EU citizens), and nothing else is included on the page that could track you (check it if you don't believe me). You can anonymize your profile, you can edit it and you can use one of several services to get your data out. On the whole it i…
> Why is HN non-compliant?
> They use Cloudflare
Just the fact that you use some GDPR-compliant service doesn't mean that your product is GDPR-compliant. Because your product has to make sure that it stores, processes, removes, rotates etc. personally-identifiable data in a GDPR-compliant way.
E.g. HN doesn't offer a way to request the data they have on me, or to delete my account. This is not GDPR-compliant.
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, I hope they will rectify and allow access again for EU users at some point soon. Honestly, I don't. I don't want this precedent of government overreach to stand. I wish more international companies would stop doing business with US citizens for the same reasons. > It seems to go against the idea of a borderless internet, and I blame the companies for that, not the EU. You don't blame border-based rules for…
> Honestly, I don't. I don't want this precedent of government overreach to stand. Why is it overreach? It's literally why we invented government! I, the little guy, couldn't find giants like Facebook or Google. That's why I asked my democratically elected government to work on the problem.
To me it's overreach because smaller measures could have been a better first step, this won't help the problem much, and it hurts the non-targets. I understand it's why you asked your government to work on the problem. We just need to stop pretending that any way they work on the problem is a good one.
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#219Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how can be a business sustainable in this way?
Hopefully what will happen is that it will be more expensive to advertise and publishers will earn more on dumber ads Obviously if ads are less targeted then they may be less effective so advertisers will make less on ads that cost more. This will hurt their bottom line, which in turn will make the products we buy more expensive. But that's exactly the end goal. I want to pay for things (information, products) with m…
It would be nice to give people the option. I personally would love everything to be free, and show me ads instead. I don't see how my integrity has anything to do with it.