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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

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COPPA only applies to sites that are directed towards children or have "actual knowledge" that they're collecting data from children. It's legally sufficient to ask for birthdays and refuse signups from anyone under 13.

Can companies do the same here? “Are you in the EU? Y/N”

[deleted]

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

#722
post #620
post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This may be an edgy and rebellious sentiment that makes me a radical anti-privacy activist, but unless you're storing levels of information on me that are similar to facebook/google/etc., I do not give a damn whether you're soft-deleting or hard-deleting my IP address and my user account. If your web app is just a web app, and not one component of a vast surveillance octopus which puts tentacles on almost every web…

If you don't store PII, you don't have to do any work. Done. If you need to have PII for your webapp to function, you barely have to do any work besides giving the that care people their rights The problem is not the work that the GDPR requires, the problem is the work I'll have to put into understanding the GDPR. I think it's mainly a difference in viewpoint: this is my data for me. Not yours. This is the part that…

> In the real world, it's not your data, it's my memory.

This is where there's been a divergence on thought. In the real world you have limited capabilities to collect and store the data that is currently being collected. You're physically limited in how much you can retain and retrieve. In your old timey example I assume the diary to be sitting there in the back of the shop just being a record of my name and what I bought, but that's not how a lot of data is being used or being collected online.

The equivalent would be you making the diary automatically write down a potential unlimited amount of data on me and then using it to sell advertising the moment I enter the shop.

If I went past your store and it automatically retrieved physical details about myself, what I'm wearing, my interests, hobbies, location and you then built a profile and then sold this information to advertisers there absolutely would be regulations regarding this in the real world.

A better example:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23425297

Privacy limits As retailers trial such tech they are well aware there is a risk of a privacy backlash.

Clothes store Nordstrom recently cancelled a scheme which tracked customers' movements through its stores using their phones' wi-fi signals after complaints.

"Are we willing to accept our everyday movements being monitored and analysed, not to keep us safe but purely to allow advertisers to target us? I think people will start to say no, our privacy is worth more than a few advertising dollars."

--

You say shop with a diary to present the most innocent of examples but for every shop with a diary there's billions of stalkers following people everywhere they go to learn as much about them as possible in order to sell them products and influence how they think which they never agreed to.

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

#723

How this checks if a user is European when using US VPN or being on holidays outside EU?

It uses its magic crystal ball, while simultaneously consulting a legion of captive demons to determine this and other similarly unknowable information.

Unknowable? It's can check your browser footprint and ask Facebook/Google if you are on holiday.

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

#724
post #619

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-…

What is the fear about startups? If you look at the ones you actually use reliably for a decade, very few would have been stymied by GDPR. To add on to this, for every successful startups there seem to be many mostly replaceable ones. If anything, a reduction in the rate of new startups would indicate that perhaps the market is growing MORE rational, which corroborates the recognition of risk of PII that the GDPR man…

For some reason when I read your comment I had a vision of the Reddit founders in the very early days, waking up in the middle of the night to restart the server when it had crashed. Their sanity was very nearly wrecked because they didn't know about the existence of daemon supervisor tools yet. God help them if they'd had to deal with GDPR while still sleep-deprived.

Early-stage startups do not, in general, have their shit together. A straw may not break a camel's back, but a camel embryo would have a harder time with it.

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

#725
post #620
post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This may be an edgy and rebellious sentiment that makes me a radical anti-privacy activist, but unless you're storing levels of information on me that are similar to facebook/google/etc., I do not give a damn whether you're soft-deleting or hard-deleting my IP address and my user account. If your web app is just a web app, and not one component of a vast surveillance octopus which puts tentacles on almost every web…

If you don't store PII, you don't have to do any work. Done. If you need to have PII for your webapp to function, you barely have to do any work besides giving the that care people their rights The problem is not the work that the GDPR requires, the problem is the work I'll have to put into understanding the GDPR. I think it's mainly a difference in viewpoint: this is my data for me. Not yours. This is the part that…

If you're using the data to make money, and the user is generating that data, why do you just get to keep and sell it? How is that any different than you owning some forest land and I just come in and take some animals from the land to sell for meat?

You might call it poaching, but that only became a crime when society made it one, and that's what the GPDR is doing now with personal data

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

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN has been overrun by MBAs a long time ago

I'm not sure whether you're agreeing or disagreeing with your parent comment, but I'm just tacking this on there because it feels right: I think HN has just hit peak stupidity. The amount of paranoia, misreading, misunderstanding, etc. about the GDPR is just insane (or intentional shilling, but let's not go all tin-foil-hatty prematurely). Nobody who's doing anything even remotely above-board is panicking or anything…

> paperwork notwithstanding

thats the main point for me. Some of GDPR is good: right to delete in a reasonable fashion is great. Right to not be personally identified is awesome, but that's much easier to do in the ISP level. Adtech creates problems - that should mean you have to regulate adtech. But GDPR is more about documentation, bureaucracy and Vista-style popups than about how to protect data. You need a lawyer just to put ads on your site. It's a draconian law designed by a single-issue Green leftist, which relegated IP addresses to the status of some kind of fatally dangerous information. It breaks the web from a "web" to a series of tubes with doors in between. The severity of the law is out of proportion with the average internet user's concern about privacy: time and again people have shown they just don't value it as much as the law suggests.

After a few days, when the cheerleading has stopped people are going to be faced with some unpleasant realities: small business switching to facebook (because otherwise their website would contain more legalese than content) and ecommerce turning more towards the large marketplaces. In this sense, Facebook, Google and ebay/amazon become one-stop shops for GDPR-compliant solutions. The reason: GDPR removes options but offers no alternatives.

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

#727
post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. It is more likely the United States will create the opposite regime. Since all major Internet software firms are American or Chinese it is also possible that the EU May sideline itself.

I think it's more likely that other countries will adopt similar data protection rules (and they should).

Why do you think that likely? I don't think it is at all likely, the CIA et. al. like facebook too much.

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

#729

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-…

It's no big deal because not everyone in here is in B2C marketplace. I have SaaS services aimed at businesses. I don't give a damn about GDPR. It mostly doesn't affect me. On the other hand as a EU citizen I wholeheartedly welcome it. Sure, it's a draconian law and given time it will get polished but let's just face reality. Online advertising and whatnot has gotten out of hand. You visit any given site and it loads…

If you store emails or people's names, you need to care. It has nothing to do with the type of business you are.

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

#730

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-…

The problem isn’t so much as there’s a cost to implementing GDPR, but that the tech community has been “move fast and break things” and refused to handle things properly before. If all you do about my PII is “set delete = 1” (which one could argue isn’t even the best practice in every scenario), then I probably don’t want you to handle my PII at all. To your example, you could easily not switch to a CASCADE, but inst…

> If all you do about my PII is “set delete = 1” (which one could argue isn’t even the best practice in every scenario), then I probably don’t want you to handle my PII at all.

Are you aware that setting “delete=1” is essentially what file systems do when deleting a file? What file system do you suggest companies to use when they want to comply with GDPR?

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