I for one love the fact that companies I dealt with once who knows how many years ago are begging me to click a link to "keep in touch." Good bloody riddance. This is possibly the best privacy news of the Internet age.
GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
411–420 of 1001 posts
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel the EU regulators could stand to learn something. If EU citizens are small portion of your users, and your tasked with parsing this document http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX... just blocking them doesn't seem like that bad of an idea, especially with the fines involved. I think the things that bother me is: 1) A College student working on a side project with no revenue are treated t…
> A College student working on a side project with no revenue are treated the same as some massive multi-national. And why not? The result/harm is the same. It doesn't matter a bit whether a company's web site is handing its visitors' data over to Facebook or a "private site" does. The side project or the private site always have the option of not participating in the adtech frenzy. But of course they want to partici…
It's not the same. There're companies which intentionally collect and exploit private data. There're companies which are just behaving negligently with users data. There should be different penalty for intentional and negligent violation.
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a French guy, these type of comments make me smile. The GDPR is basically just the implementation of the French law "Informatique et Liberté" into the European Level. (You can read on HN many Germans saying that it's actually the implementation of the Datenschutzgesetzt. The truth is: these two laws are extremely similar.) This law has been in application since 1978 [1]. And in 2018, we have adtech companies like…
You mean Criteo the company that has lost over 50% of their valuation since last year because of cookie and consent issues? Yea it's going really well for them. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CRTO/chart?p=CRTO The difference is that France is insignificant in the adtech market. The real money is in the US and spread out across Europe, with Asia soon to overtake. The existing rules you point to weren't affecting glob…
First of all "insignificant" is far fetched. Small? Yes. But not insignificant.
Second... I don't see how valuation matters. Did they loose money? Went out of business? No. VW lost valuation during the whole diesel gate scandal. Did that make VW a less relevant? No.
And the last thing that I wanted to mention: I said "this is just an implementation of an old French law into the European Level". And I was mentioning the French law itself, not the European Law.
The cookie issue that you're mentioning is related to the ePrivacy directive, which is solely European Law, that was passed one or two years before the whole lost of valuation. My point was just that the GDPR doesn't affect anybody.
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#414There's one very important problem with this approach: this blocks people from accessing your site who are doing so from the EU, whereas the GDPR applies to EU citizens, wherever they access the Internet from.
In other words, an EU citizen residing in and accessing the Internet from the US has just as much right to invoke the GDPR with these sites as an EU citizen residing in and accessing the Internet from the EU. Blocking people accessing your site from the EU does not allow your site to not respond to such requests.
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#415I keep seeing these posts on how to block European users to avoid the GDPR. As a citizen of Europe, seeing these posts consistently making it to the front page is disappointing. It would seem that Silicon Valley perceives the GDPR as more of a hindrance than an opportunity to offer users better privacy. Nothing has been learned.
I think the response from European citizens on hackernews has been disappointing. I see many refuse to accept any of the negatives of GDP
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#416I keep seeing these posts on how to block European users to avoid the GDPR. As a citizen of Europe, seeing these posts consistently making it to the front page is disappointing. It would seem that Silicon Valley perceives the GDPR as more of a hindrance than an opportunity to offer users better privacy. Nothing has been learned.
I'd love a browser plugin that indicates a site I'm visiting is blocked in the EU. I'm not in the EU, but if I site cares that little about my privacy that they don't want to comply with GDPR then I don't want to use it. I might just start browsing through a VPN terminating in the EU anyway.
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am European browsing from a non-EU IP. Seems to me a blanket ban on EU IPs is both draconic and ineffective. As for SV seeing GDPR as more of a hindrance: SV was build on the freemium model of gathering as much data as possible. Companies were funded under the assumption that their user growth would lead to valuable data stores. GDPR and an increased privacy aware public are existential threats to these companies,…
> ban on EU IPs is both draconic and ineffective It doesn't matter it's ineffective. The block means they're complying with GDPR's requirement that they not target Europeans.
But they still process European user data if they do not block my IP. So they are not complying at all with GDPR's main requirement, just a poorly singled-out subclause.
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes me wonder: what about wechat? Surely Tencent has many overseas Chinese users in Europe, and I’m sure they play as or more aggressively as the American majors. Is Europe going to sanction Chinese companies for violations along with American ones?
Facebook is legally an Ireland company FYI.
Facebook is most definitely American even if their European subsidiary is based in Ireland. That is all moot under the law anyways, as they consider global revenue of any parent company, not just that of the subsidiary.
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm wondering this too actually, I run a small business, we collect only the bare minimum of information from our customers but we do have some European customers. I'm ignoring GDPR completely, is there any downside for me? Will they block customers from using my service? Will they sieze my European cloud servers? Or can I safely do nothing as I currently am because I don't reside or have a registered business in Eur…
"but we do have some european customers" The entire point is, NO you can't just ignore GDPR. Your lack of action toward compliance is negligent.
There are thousands of laws on the books where nothing happens when you ignore them. Sure it is possible that the EU will pick some obscure small company doing boring business things outside of the EU to make a test case out of, but how likely is this?
Anyone not up to shady activity can afford to wait for the case law and best practices to settle before doing anything.
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#420I simply don't understand how or why a law that has scope in the EU is causing trouble for companies which conduct no business in the EU beyond responding to HTTP requests on a global decentralized telecommunications network. Why would an American internet business which conducts no operations in Europe and has no servers in Europe be subject to regulation that affects the EU? What is going to happen? Is the EU going…
EU will not be able to enforce GDPR law in other countries, unless company has a subsidiary in the EU. Otherwise any country in the world can create their laws and expect that anyone in the world following them.
Unfortunately that horse has already left the barn. Have a look at the USA's FATCA law or any of their sanction laws against countries like Cuba or Iran.