It‘s such an abhorrent marketing style of talking. "Your life is important to us. Therefore we must kill you.“
It is a very safe assumption to make that anything you see or hear in media means the exact opposite.
It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
11–20 of 192 posts
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#12Jeez, what a mess. To extend the McDonald’s analogy, when McDonald’s is serving its American customers, it doesn’t heed European laws about beef and potatoes. Because those laws are irrelevant to them, they have no bearing on McDonald’s making money (again in the context of serving their American customers). McDonald’s is never going to check what Brussels says about dairy before they make a milkshake in Spokane. Sor…
You missed the McDonald's analogy. A burger in every shop in the U.S. will taste the same as any other. It follows the rules of the franchise, just as every site I linked is a cookie cutter website for local news. Each "local" site has nearly the same functionality, look, backend... because they are from the same supplier. It's news franchises serving your local paper and TV station, and it has been for a while.
Certainly, this media conglomerate does not need to care about European visitors, but to claim they do on the "Access Denied" page is quite hypocritical.
I hadn't even mentioned the detail, "while we work to ensure..." This would imply they've been doing anything at all for the past three years.
Also, I'm 15 miles away from a Google office, so I guess I've been using a European search engine all along!
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#13Maybe the cost of GDPR compliance just isn't worth the small amount of revenue that they might make from European visitors? US visitors are probably much more 'valuable' in terms of advertisement revenue, and also much more likely to be a subscriber. And I say this as a European myself. It sucks that I have to jump through hoops to access some sites but I can't really blame them.
I'm not really offended that I can't see all content from Europe, but the idiotic newspeak like "Our European visitors are important to us." is almost offensive. I don't see why they aren't just honest.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#14I always read this as: "Our European visitors are important to us BUT vacuuming all your data and selling to multiple bidders is importanter " You wanna be obnoxious? Sure, go ahead, but I'll dislike your site more (and I have adblock so I have no qualms in accepting). Wanna pretend you're compliant by having an obvious non-compliant "solution" and think that will shield your responsibility? Now I'll just hate you an…
They're serving you a web-page regardless. It probably isn't the data as much as they don't want to run afoul of EU law.
Breaking the law is a generally considered a big mistake and regardless of the stereotyping about businesses they can be pretty timid when dealing with governments.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#15Jeez, what a mess. To extend the McDonald’s analogy, when McDonald’s is serving its American customers, it doesn’t heed European laws about beef and potatoes. Because those laws are irrelevant to them, they have no bearing on McDonald’s making money (again in the context of serving their American customers). McDonald’s is never going to check what Brussels says about dairy before they make a milkshake in Spokane. Sor…
This: > McDonald’s is never going to check what Brussels says about dairy before they make a milkshake in Spokane. Sorry. conflicts with this: > law is introduced, business figures out the easiest way to deal with it and get back to what they were doing, rinse and repeat. So which is it? If they care about Brussels, then they are willing to go the extra mile. If they don't care, why put up the block anyways?
Amen. If a court in the EU fines the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, what is stopping the Chronicle from replying, "lol ok." and continuing to not care?
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#16This should become a meme so that those companies will think twice in using that phrasing.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#17Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#18“We care about your privacy.” is also a real joker. Those boxes often provide no “opt-out all” button and force you to “object” to “legitimate interests” one-by-one even if you do “opt-out”.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#19Maybe the cost of GDPR compliance just isn't worth the small amount of revenue that they might make from European visitors? US visitors are probably much more 'valuable' in terms of advertisement revenue, and also much more likely to be a subscriber. And I say this as a European myself. It sucks that I have to jump through hoops to access some sites but I can't really blame them.
It’s a bit silly because serving the content without cookies doesn’t cost more than not serving anything. It’s not like a restaurant where serving a steak means you now have one less steak, it’s just data that you can copy as much as you want.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#20Is this really what's considered good content on HN at this point? I come here specifically to avoid junk like this.
Disappointing.