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Instapaper is going independent

blog.instapaper.com

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Re: Instapaper is going independent

#151

Post by HatchedLake721 »

bartread wrote: post #122
howitworks wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to sound trite or dismissive, but the blame should be directed at EU legislators. If I create another software product I will explicitly and permanently make it unavailable to EU residents.

This narrative has long since become tired. If you don't respect your users' privacy you don't deserve to do business in the EU. And make no mistake: whether you like it or not, that legislation - or something very like it - is going to jump the Atlantic sooner or later, so why not position yourself ahead of the curve instead of stropping off and taking your ball home? There are side-effects I don't like about GDPR,…

Cookie notifications have nothing to do with GDPR.

Re: Instapaper is going independent

#152

Post by briandear »

adtac wrote: post #47
chmars wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is really GDPR-ready, however, data privacy law is about being good enough. Yep, there isn’t full compliance ever. Instapaper looks very desperate with its GDPR-lockout of EU users. I guess the EU market is mostly lost …

If only the EU gave these companies a 2-year headstart to become compliant. Oh wait.

Even if you are 100% compliant, that doesn't protect you from getting sued or having to answer potentially hundreds of thousands of inquiries.

The compliance risk is what's dangerous and challenging, not the actual "fixing" of systems. Many people in these comments seem to have no experience with business risk management. They think it's as simple as "just make data deletable." But, the technical side is the easy part. It's the getting sued part that's potentially catastrophic. Even if you "win" you still have spent thousands or tens of thousands defending. And even if you do win, you could be sued again the very next day.

GDPR is more than just deleting data, it's a massive business risk to even companies doing it "right."

Re: Instapaper is going independent

#153

Post by elgenie »

bartread wrote: post #122
howitworks wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to sound trite or dismissive, but the blame should be directed at EU legislators. If I create another software product I will explicitly and permanently make it unavailable to EU residents.

This narrative has long since become tired. If you don't respect your users' privacy you don't deserve to do business in the EU. And make no mistake: whether you like it or not, that legislation - or something very like it - is going to jump the Atlantic sooner or later, so why not position yourself ahead of the curve instead of stropping off and taking your ball home? There are side-effects I don't like about GDPR,…

The cookie foolishness started as an a EU Directive that was adopted in May 2011.

It doesn't have anything to do with GDPR, but it's a fantastic example of (likely) well-intended European privacy regulation both is utterly useless and also stands zero chance of jumping the Atlantic.

Re: Instapaper is going independent

#154

Post by pembrook »

a1369209993 wrote: post #138
pembrook wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could understand the outrage if this was a service you were paying for. But this is a Free service being provided to you. Why do you believe you have the right to dictate how someone else uses their time when you're not paying for it?

I believe that I have the right to demand that someone else doesn't use their time to burglarize my house, and if they and other companies have made a side business of burglarizing peoples houses, I think it's entirely resonable to demand that they and any similar company spend time proving that they aren't planning to continue. (And yes, I realize the houses in this metaphor rarely have doors in their doorways, much…

That analogy makes no sense.

The proper analogy would be: You invite a volunteer carpenter in to fix your cabinets. He asks if he can write down what cereal your family eats instead of taking payment. You say sure! (ie agree to the terms of service).

New law passes. He refuses to come back and fix your cabinets for free next time because he doesn’t want to get sued for writing down the cereal names improperly.

You then scream at him and call him names, and try to ruin his reputation on the internet and accuse him of being a thief.

Maybe if the sanctity of what cereal your family eats is so important to you, you should just directly pay money to a normal carpenter next time?

Re: Instapaper is going independent

#155

Post by marbletiles »

briandear wrote: post #145
Chilinot wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your product can't follow the GDPR legislation then I'm glad you don't allow EU residents to use it. Since you are most likely abusing the privacy of your customers. While I'm a bit annoyed at the amount of paperwork and side systems that need to be constructed to ensure proper handling of personal data that I have had to implement, I can only see GDPR as something positive for the people.

Why should EU residents not be allowed to decide what they want to use and not use? I'm not sure I understand why the EU makes laws that effectively decide what websites "free" people are allowed to visit.

For similar reasons that “free” people aren’t allowed to visit restaurants with health code violations.

People have to be able to make informed decisions. It’s hard to tell from the outside if a restaurant is safe, so we have inspections. It’s impossible to tell if a website is trustworthy with your personal data, so we have laws to try and ensure they will be.

You really don’t understand this?

Re: Instapaper is going independent

#156

Post by hermitdev »

bartread wrote: post #123
coldtea wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can piss on customers for 2 months and then drop a "sorry for the inconvenience". And for no good reason. Just assume the improbable cost of some litigation as a company, like tens of thousands of others (including much bigger and much smaller than yours) did, put up a message to European customers and have them click and proceed as usual to the service. Or, you know, use the headstart of more than…

I'm not sure why the above is getting downvoted. Sure, it's a bit salty, but if I were paying for instapaper (which I realise is cheap as chips, but the principle still stands) I don't think I'd be very impressed with being locked out for two months. Genuine question: as an EU citizen, without the use of a VPN or proxy is it still possible to at least log on to the service to cancel your account?

Not an EU citizen, but I'd think it'd be pretty shady if they cut you off and didn't automatically suspend any subscription charges until they can properly serve you again.

Re: Instapaper is going independent

#157

Post by throwaway37585 »

bartread wrote: post #122
howitworks wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to sound trite or dismissive, but the blame should be directed at EU legislators. If I create another software product I will explicitly and permanently make it unavailable to EU residents.

This narrative has long since become tired. If you don't respect your users' privacy you don't deserve to do business in the EU. And make no mistake: whether you like it or not, that legislation - or something very like it - is going to jump the Atlantic sooner or later, so why not position yourself ahead of the curve instead of stropping off and taking your ball home? There are side-effects I don't like about GDPR,…

> If you don't respect your users' privacy you don't deserve to do business in the EU.

So you're going to make the decision of what constitutes "respecting my privacy" for every single person in the EU?

Re: Instapaper is going independent

#158

Post by flukus »

briandear wrote: post #152
adtac wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only the EU gave these companies a 2-year headstart to become compliant. Oh wait.

Even if you are 100% compliant, that doesn't protect you from getting sued or having to answer potentially hundreds of thousands of inquiries. The compliance risk is what's dangerous and challenging, not the actual "fixing" of systems. Many people in these comments seem to have no experience with business risk management. They think it's as simple as "just make data deletable." But, the technical side is the easy par…

> Even if you are 100% compliant, that doesn't protect you from getting sued or having to answer potentially hundreds of thousands of inquiries.

You can be sued at essentially anytime for any reason, long before the GDPR. If you're worried about a GDPR lawsuit ruining your company then you're either violating the GDPR or you should have shut down already because the risk was already there.

Re: Instapaper is going independent

#159

Post by joshenders »

xienze wrote: post #112
joshenders wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burned a lot of trust? How is this a violation of trust? If a company can’t meet their GDPR obligations under this law, EU citizens have successfully voiced through legislation that they don’t want these businesses operating in the EU. You can’t have your tea and drink it too. This is a consequence.

It's a bit of a mischaracterization to label US companies that punt on GDPR with the "well they're obviously shitty companies that wantonly toss around their users's personal information, so good riddance" brush. As someone very deeply involved with a medium-sized company's move to GDPR compliance, I can confirm that there are about a million different legal opinions about what GDPR means and it's causing a LOT of an…

Precisely and furthermore, it’s unreasonable to expect Pinterest to prioritize millions of dollars in labor to speculate and react to provisional legislation.

1. There was no certainty GDPR was going to pass.

2. There was no certainty as to what language would be used in the final document.

3. There was no certainty as to how/when it would be enforced.

By the time GDPR was actually passed, the lead time to enforcement was a slap in the face.

And to be honest, the compliance dates felt like a calculated attack to further the EUs moronic crusade against Facebook and Google, knowing full and well they were unrealistic deadlines.

Collateral damage to Instapaper and others is somehow a worthwhile trade off in the name of burning witches.

So I say, let there be consequences.

Re: Instapaper is going independent

#160

Post by ernsheong »

dejv wrote: post #52
driverdan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've tried Pocket why do you think it's horrible?

Mostly text crawling and rendering. Sometimes the articles are turncated (say half of article is missing), saving from pastebin doesn't work at all (my favorite way to save long forum posts). Also text rendering is not really good: in Instapaper you get nicely fullscreen text, not really true for Pocket: they keep too much text formating (colors, sometimes also some layouts elements) and quite often I am getting arti…

Hey devj, maker of https://pagedash.com here. PageDash saves the entire article as HTML. Try it out and see if you like it :)
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