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

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

apility.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 1001 posts

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

#631

Post by bardworx »

sebleon wrote: post #615
gerdesj wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have keyed in and deleted so many efforts at an answer to your question that I have given up and find myself merely asking: "Have you actually read the regs?" http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX... My reading of them finds no second/third order anything. The regs are surprisingly clear. I forgot to mention that unless you are trying to abuse EU citizens in some way then you have no problems…

> surprisingly clear This is an 88 page document with extremely dry language. Just confirming your assertion will be time consuming. No wonder many American services would rather shut out EU users than comply.

This is a silly and downright crude comment. My mortgage contract was 56 “dry” pages and I found time to read/understand it, to the best of my ability.

If you own a business, the cost of reading this document is about 2 days (with consideration for googling terms). To disenfranchise a whole continent because you are inconvenienced is ridiculous.

Put it a different way: are you too busy to read docs/specs of the technology you are using or will you abandon it because specs are too dry?

American services are just busy because they are doing their best to keep the lights on. Within a week, the handful of companies will comply. They’re just cautious because they have to pay folks and don’t want to make a silly mistake that will shut down their business.

Edit: structure

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

#632

Post by anonymouz »

sebleon wrote: post #615
gerdesj wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have keyed in and deleted so many efforts at an answer to your question that I have given up and find myself merely asking: "Have you actually read the regs?" http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX... My reading of them finds no second/third order anything. The regs are surprisingly clear. I forgot to mention that unless you are trying to abuse EU citizens in some way then you have no problems…

> surprisingly clear This is an 88 page document with extremely dry language. Just confirming your assertion will be time consuming. No wonder many American services would rather shut out EU users than comply.

Are there no laws in the US?

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

#633

Post by eli »

gerdesj wrote: post #506
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-…

I'm a Brit. I am the MD of a small IT company. I have two partners and 20 employees. We started in 2000. We turn over about £1.5Mpa. We sell our services to people and organisations. Our backups are now smaller these days (thanks to GDPR). I understand that because you are outside the EU you might feel like a target but that is not the point of GDPR. There is no way on earth that the EU as a whole has looked on your…

It's reassuring to hear that the GDPR is not meant to target little startups and projects but I would like it a lot better if it said that in the actual law, rather than just trusting all current and future regulators to treat me kindly.

If it's only meant to be used against big companies or extreme offenders, why doesn't it say so? It seems like the spirit of the law and the language of the law are not aligned and in my opinion that's a sign of poorly designed regulation.

I object to the idea that small projects should be ok with breaking the law merely because they very likely won't get caught.

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

#634

Post by [deleted] »

orf wrote: post #54
outside1234 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, if you are running a business where 99% of your customers are outside of the EU, its totally rational versus opening yourself up to massive liability.

You need to purge that 1% customer data though. If you're accepting EU citizens data through any channel - another business, them using a VPN, via smoke signals, you need to comply.

[deleted]

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

#635

Post by ng12 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #623
ng12 wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I'm not onboard with the idea that Silicon Valley holds a monopoly on technical innovation. Getting people to click on ads on smartphones doesn't capture the entire scope of technology. Europe's economy is roughly as large as that of the United States. Many world-leading companies from the car industry, to chemicals, to biotech reside in Europe. The US holds one dominating advantage in one subset of technology. Consu…

That's exactly my point. The EU is built for entrenched institutions. There is no entrepreneurial spirit -- and that's why there's N-number of self driving car companies in the US and zero(?) in the EU, for example.

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

#636

Post by basilgohar »

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.

It sounds to me like this reflects more on the startup's sloppy practices than anything else. Prevalence of this bad practice shouldn't be an excuse for it.

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

#637

Post by JoshMnem »

Spooky23 wrote: post #628
ng12 wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Is it? Visit Germany sometime. Drive through the countryside. Most parts of the US look like a hollowed out shell by comparison.

> Drive through the countryside. Most parts of the US look like a hollowed out shell by comparison.

In what way do you mean? Wind power?

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

#638

Post by draw_down »

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.

[dead]

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

#639

Post by alexbeloi »

mc32 wrote: post #496
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-…

Even if you delete it from disk and remove from memory, you may be required to remove it from offline backups too like tapes and other media.

Presumably you are also required to delete it from any training data for an ML model, does that make any models trained on previous set of data illegal to use?

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

#640

Post by gerdesj »

sebleon wrote: post #615
gerdesj wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have keyed in and deleted so many efforts at an answer to your question that I have given up and find myself merely asking: "Have you actually read the regs?" http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX... My reading of them finds no second/third order anything. The regs are surprisingly clear. I forgot to mention that unless you are trying to abuse EU citizens in some way then you have no problems…

> surprisingly clear This is an 88 page document with extremely dry language. Just confirming your assertion will be time consuming. No wonder many American services would rather shut out EU users than comply.

"This is an 88 page document with extremely dry language"

It starts along these lines after the usual intro:

"The processing of personal data should be designed to serve mankind The right to the protection of personal data is not an absolute right; it must be considered in relation to its function in society and be balanced against other fundamental rights, in accordance with the principle of proportionality"

I'll grant you that lacks a certain something but the language is compatible with another well respected charter of rights that you should be more familiar with.

FFS, do you not notice the similarities!

Post reply on HN