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GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

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Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#601

Post by martimarkov »

jv22222 wrote: post #585
jeremyt wrote: post #479

I’ve been reading hacker news for about a decade, and it’s getting to the point where I don’t think there are many entrepreneurs and/or technical people on here anymore. The number of people who are saying it’s no big deal to comply with this huge law, especially for very small startups, is mind boggling. Let’s just take one feature: the requirement that you can permanently delete all of your information. Most early-…

Thank you for saying this, another thing that is ridiculously difficult is to delete specific user from all your backups. This is made even worse if you have multi region backups and cold back ups. Even a one-year-old start up could have literally thousands of database dumps in different places if they followed best practice of triple redundant daily dumps.

They also had 2 years to come up with a way to fix all of that and if they haven’t I don’t think it’s ok for them to be holding that information in the first place. GDPR does give a window for you to remove the data. They could delete the information from the backups over a period of time.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#602

Post by ShroudedNight »

black_puppydog wrote: post #427
tquinn wrote: post #244

Earlier 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…

> It's a foreign requirement that feels like a violation of sovereignty. It must feel horrible, now that the US is on the receiving end of this for a change... ;)

Notwithstanding any opinions of the contents of the directive itself, as Canadian citizen, the schadenfreude of the United States getting its comeuppance is not nearly worth another foreign federal government imposing its will on our domestic activities.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#603

Post by hyprCoin »

ThJ wrote: post #53

I 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 just spent the last few weeks on this and the regulators took a 'tech should conform to my understanding' approach. It's horrible legislation, time consuming across a still-emerging field (talk about hindering progress..) and I'm not even part of the EU. I am tempted to just shut off my services to the EU until I redeploy everything as dapps and wipe my hands of this nonsense. Let EU deal with blocking eth because it doesn't conform to the way they think technology should work.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#604

Post by manigandham »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #584
bcheung wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny thing is there are also mandatory data retention regulations that say data MUST be maintained for a certain period of time by law. It's getting worse, but it's generally been the case that it's impossible for an individual to bootstrap a company and be 100% compliant with every law and tax regulation. You would never have any time to actually provide a product and service customers. You just do the best you can…

GDPR just says that if you are keeping data, you have to have a good reason for it. If you have to retain certain data for eg tax purposes, then that sounds like a good reason to me.

That's so reductionist as to be useless. What is a "good" reason? Are you a judge that will be presiding over these cases? Things like that are massive holes for litigation and the cause of all these compliance issues in the first place.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#605

Post by strken »

manfredo wrote: post #454
takeda wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A College student working on a side project with no revenue are treated the same as some massive multi-national. Am I reading this wrong? If the college student creates just a simple page, he/she is already complaint with GDPR. If the student starts collecting personal information, then they need to know what's allowed or not. There are already things that are not legal to do, GDPR just adds private information int…

If a kid makes a meme generator site where you can create a profile and organize your dank memes, then now they have to have a data protection officer, build a system to purge user data, and build a system to get user consent, etc. I can easily see small websites just ignoring GDPR and hoping they fly under the radar. Or, using something like this Cloudflare configuration to block all EU users until they reach a size…

I can easily see small websites just ignoring GDPR and hoping they fly under the radar.

This is my plan. What are they going to do, extradite me over claims that my access logs includes IP addresses? Claim that I do business in the EU when I don't take payments, every side project I've made is in English, and I've never set foot there?

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#606

Post by johnrichardson »

A trend I've noticed from lurking and browsing these comments: commenters who have experience taking risk and operating under existential conditions in stressful, budget constrained companies (AKA, startup founders) tend to be critical of the GDPR.

Commenters who work as 9-5 employees or have never started a company (or at least, don't mention as having done so in their profiles) tend to be more supportive of the GDPR.

Funny how that works..

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#607

Post by 8bitsrule »

I'm glad see that the EU has created a potent reason for US internet services to take a hard look at their tracking/privacy feeding-frenzy.

When my ad-blocker tells me that 50 to 200 trackers are interested in me reading some innocuous, unparsable word-blob, or watching some throwaway video, I see that as a symptom of thoughtless hoarding and unreasonable prying. This is not gathering intelligence: quite the opposite.

Were there some demonstrable, substantial benefit to all this for the end-user it might make a bit more sense. But there are no upsides to seeing shark fins at the beach.

When I guesstimate the costs -- just those of energy usage, bandwidth and man-hours, not to mention the rest -- and compare that to the supposed results (only imaginary to me, the end-user)? Sorry, it looks like madness.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#608

Post by manigandham »

8bitsrule wrote: post #607

I'm glad see that the EU has created a potent reason for US internet services to take a hard look at their tracking/privacy feeding-frenzy. When my ad-blocker tells me that 50 to 200 trackers are interested in me reading some innocuous, unparsable word-blob, or watching some throwaway video, I see that as a symptom of thoughtless hoarding and unreasonable prying. This is not gathering intelligence: quite the opposite…

> I see that as a symptom of thoughtless hoarding and unreasonable prying

It's a symptom of people not paying for content and news. Also the fact that publishers want to provide equal and easy access to everyone regardless of affordability.

> demonstrable, substantial benefit to all this for the end-user it might make a bit more sense.

The content you're consuming.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#609

Post by mrep »

maxsilver wrote: post #156
throwaway974 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR has effects way beyond better user privacy. Sorry I've been pasting this in multiple GDPR related threads, but here it goes: I have a profitable, bootstrapped SaaS business based in US. It's not based on ads or selling data. I don't even have a freemium plan. Only a limited free trial after which you have to start paying. It's a trivial application that stores mostly already public data. Only email is required t…

> The VP and director love my product and want to start using it right away for their department. But their legal team is scared shitless with 4% fines in GDPR. (snip) That's their interpretation of GDPR. It doesn't matter whether it's right or wrong. This is the side-effect of GDPR. I understand it's frustrating on your side, because you have no control over the response of your customers. But understanding what GDP…

It doesn't make the law right either. Also, those VP's might be doing their job perfectly and the net effect could be that they cannot share data with any non-EU companies stifling their competitive advantages.

There are many real world effects of GDPR and we are just starting to see the pros/cons of it.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#610

Post by ng12 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #550
jeremyt wrote: post #479

I’ve been reading hacker news for about a decade, and it’s getting to the point where I don’t think there are many entrepreneurs and/or technical people on here anymore. The number of people who are saying it’s no big deal to comply with this huge law, especially for very small startups, is mind boggling. Let’s just take one feature: the requirement that you can permanently delete all of your information. Most early-…

Tired of the eternal startup excuse to justify bad behaviour when it comes to protection of consumer privacy. If it is impossible for some startups to respect strong privacy practices maybe we simply don't need those startups. This 'startupism' is almost an ideology. No mechanical engineer would complain about safety regulation just because it means that they cannot start a business in their garage. In other industri…

Here's a thought: regulation like this is, along with the heavy-handed ideology that lead to it, is the reason why the EU is still lagging regarding technical innovation. I think this attitude is the primary reason Silicon Valley took hold in the USA and that the EU has nothing comparable. If the EU wants to legislate itself out of the future they're more than welcome to do so -- and I applaud every site who makes the tough decision to stonewall EU users.
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