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Ask HN: How is GDPR affecting your business?

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Re: Ask HN: How is GDPR affecting your business?

#41

Post by KirinDave »

drspacemonkey wrote: post #8
geofft wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what industry is the company in, and are you in Europe (either physically, or do you have a significant European market)?

We're in fintech. And we're not in Europe, but we're about to start a big project targeted towards European users.

If you're not in Europe there's no obligation. I can appreciate the attitude even if I don't like it. Fintech is a REALLY difficult business to make money in. Especially with so many larger financial institutions coming in and buying any naive existential threat they see (coughs suggestively)

Re: Ask HN: How is GDPR affecting your business?

#42

Post by KirinDave »

jacquesm wrote: post #30
drspacemonkey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in fintech. And we're not in Europe, but we're about to start a big project targeted towards European users.

Wow. That's a pretty interesting attitude to take. The consensus here among the M&A crowd is that either fintech, medtech or social media will be the verticals where one or more examples will be made. Best to hope none of your users complains to regulators.

If the have no EU customers, no examples can be made.

It's up to residents of other to demand their governments give equal protections. We all know that won't happen in America.

Re: Ask HN: How is GDPR affecting your business?

#44

Post by KirinDave »

ebiester wrote: post #15
dvdhnt wrote: post #4

It has been 24 hours since GDPR came into effect. To be blunt, if anyone’s business has been affected dramatically, then their business is likely too brittle or unethical. If that’s the case, you should rethink your business model.

Alternatively, some part of your business has spent the last X months preparing for this so that their business won't be affected dramatically. I am easily tracked to my place of employment so I don't want to get into too many details, but we were doing things ethically but still had a non-trivial amount of going through, dotting our i's and crossing our t's, making sure that there weren't pockets of unknown data, pu…

If this is the case, then being transparent about it is a good policy. I hope your employer is committing to compliance publicly and apologizing to its customers for the delay.

Re: Ask HN: How is GDPR affecting your business?

#45

Post by drspacemonkey »

jacquesm wrote: post #30
drspacemonkey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in fintech. And we're not in Europe, but we're about to start a big project targeted towards European users.

Wow. That's a pretty interesting attitude to take. The consensus here among the M&A crowd is that either fintech, medtech or social media will be the verticals where one or more examples will be made. Best to hope none of your users complains to regulators.

We've already got users who fall under GDPR protection. Not as many as we will by the end of this year, but some.

And really, I've done all I can do. I've talked it up, given powerpoint presentations, and emailed a comprehensive report about penalties for failing to comply as well as a project outline for becoming compliant.

Re: Ask HN: How is GDPR affecting your business?

#46

Post by jacquesm »

drspacemonkey wrote: post #45
jacquesm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. That's a pretty interesting attitude to take. The consensus here among the M&A crowd is that either fintech, medtech or social media will be the verticals where one or more examples will be made. Best to hope none of your users complains to regulators.

We've already got users who fall under GDPR protection. Not as many as we will by the end of this year, but some. And really, I've done all I can do. I've talked it up, given powerpoint presentations, and emailed a comprehensive report about penalties for failing to comply as well as a project outline for becoming compliant.

I believe you. I know a few other cases like that and I really wonder how we got here. I've been CEO of a 25 people company with presence in both Canada and Europe, I would never ever chart a course like that but maybe I'm just too risk averse.

In the beginning of Camarades.com/WW.com we had a lot of interaction with LE because of all the stuff our users got up to online and we tried very hard to comply with the various laws. It did not always work perfect but it worked well enough that we earned the respect of the various LE contacts that we had. I can only imagine how it would have ended if we had thumbed our nose at them. Going global means you need to change your attitude.

Re: Ask HN: How is GDPR affecting your business?

#47

Post by ASalazarMX »

hoborama wrote: post #10

I work for one of the biggest (non-tech) companies in the world, and in many countries we've been storing user data in spreadsheets all over the place and often without consent. So it's been pretty frantic.

He asks "Have you had to make changes to the services you integrate with or create new technology" and your answer has spreadsheets. I bet that was unexpected.

Re: Ask HN: How is GDPR affecting your business?

#48

Post by kenhwang »

KirinDave wrote: post #43
kenhwang wrote: post #34

We just blocked European traffic. They're not profitable enough to be worth the headache.

Can you please tell me who you work for so I can avoid using you? I don't actually want to be profitable for you if I'm not paying for the service.

Fortune 500 in the Oscars/Emmys winning business. We have European partners and distributors for our stuff that Europeans are supposed to be using anyway. "This content is not available in your region" will probably become a lot more common. We'd prefer you pay for our content too.

Re: Ask HN: How is GDPR affecting your business?

#49

Post by dang »

falcon620 wrote: post #37
standyro wrote: post #18

I work for a major news media company and our GDPR compliance has been extremely difficult with our relatively small dev staff that manages many news outlets so we've opted to block access from all of Europe. It's gotten a lot of press, but it's an unfortunate reality. Most of our adtech and analytics vendors we use have put the burden on smaller companies like us -- ripe for disaster.

That's an interesting way to broadcast your lack of technical/lateral thinking skills over there at latimes.com (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15604736 ). You could look at USA Today's way of temporarily handling this as an example of what could be done with a few hours of work. You're saying that the GDPR is so taxing because your team is so small? Meanwhile you're recruiting data scientists to your exist…

Hounding another user like this counts as personal attack, and a virulent strain of it to boot. If you do this again we will ban you.

Please treat others respectfully on this site, regardless of how strongly you disagree with them or their employer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Ask HN: How is GDPR affecting your business?

#50

Post by standyro »

falcon620 wrote: post #37
standyro wrote: post #18

I work for a major news media company and our GDPR compliance has been extremely difficult with our relatively small dev staff that manages many news outlets so we've opted to block access from all of Europe. It's gotten a lot of press, but it's an unfortunate reality. Most of our adtech and analytics vendors we use have put the burden on smaller companies like us -- ripe for disaster.

That's an interesting way to broadcast your lack of technical/lateral thinking skills over there at latimes.com (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15604736 ). You could look at USA Today's way of temporarily handling this as an example of what could be done with a few hours of work. You're saying that the GDPR is so taxing because your team is so small? Meanwhile you're recruiting data scientists to your exist…

Your snarky attitude is the real embarrassment, and you misread into what my feelings are about GDPR.

Agreed that our company handled it poorly -- and that's on our leadership (which is a much much longer story) -- Note: my opinions are not the opinion of my employer.

But your real anger should be directed at your technologist/programmer peers who work at Facebook and Google who take six figure salaries and compromise moral dignity, not at media outlets, or small companies -- and from reading your comments on HN -- we can agree on that.

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