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It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

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91–100 of 192 posts

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#91
post #14

I 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.

Sure, I have more respect for the ones that 451 it than for the ones that pretend (very obnoxiously) to be compliant.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#92
> No idea how to get links to display properly even following "Formatting Options" instructions.

You can't have links in text posts like this. HN stories are a link or text. From https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc: "Urls become links, except in the text field of a submission."

To make proper links in comments, just put "https://" in front of them so they're URLs. "" are for unusual URLs that get mis-detected with their surrounding text, and they are hardly ever needed.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#93

What I don't understand is, why are these local US news sites required to comply with GDPR? I wouldn't think they'd have any obligation to follow it (or any possible recourse for not doing so) unless they have business operations in the EU. Are these local news sites in fact all owned by multinationals that do have operations in the EU? Edit: I'm getting downvoted -- just in case it helps to clarify, I'm not trying t…

> US-only companies feel obligated to follow it and genuinely asking why?

It doesn't matter where a company is located, only where its products are accessible. If you offer a product/service to EU citizens - for example a globally accessible news website - you have to comply with GDPR. Or you deny access to EU citizens, which is fine too.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#94

“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”.

I wonder why, when I click to choose which measures I opt in/out, by default everything is just disabled and I just press confirm. Is it just me? Anyway, always saves me some effort.

Tho I optin analytics usually :)

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#95

I’m the opposite: I grew up in Europe but live in the States. There’s a ton of European websites and content I can’t access from here. While this may suck for you personally I don’t think American companies (especially local news companies) should have to comply with invasive and expensive European privacy laws. Especially after forcing the entire world to adopt useless and annoying cookie walls. If you really want t…

I don't believe they need to comply, either. Just stop saying people living in Europe are important. They obviously are not.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#97
post #20

Is this really what's considered good content on HN at this point? I come here specifically to avoid junk like this. Disappointing.

Several times I've said that HN should block European IP addresses. Nothing they have to say is relevant in the US. And pay your own damn defense budgets.

I'm a U.S. citizen and veteran working for a company with many customers the U.S. and friends working in every reach of the country. I didn't realize I'm not part of the tech scene because of my location.

Alas, I have paid and do still pay my country's defense budget---financially, physically, emotionally.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#98

Lawmakers and voters sometimes act as if regulations are free. They think “wouldn’t it be nice” and pass on the costs to businesses. They aren’t in fact free.

Correct.

But the axiom is misguided.

Legislation on the safety of cars for instance is not free, but necessary.

You could argue that the makers of go-karts are being priced out of the market: after all, the free market should make people put a price on their own safety.

But the issue is often that people don’t really have a good grasp of what it truly means and you can’t put a monetary number on things like that.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#99
post #45

What I don't understand is, why are these local US news sites required to comply with GDPR? I wouldn't think they'd have any obligation to follow it (or any possible recourse for not doing so) unless they have business operations in the EU. Are these local news sites in fact all owned by multinationals that do have operations in the EU? Edit: I'm getting downvoted -- just in case it helps to clarify, I'm not trying t…

I understand it as: if you're taking my data as European citizen, that is protected; even if you're in the US I'm still European.

That’s incorrect. What matters is where you are, not whether you’re an EU citizen.

If an EU citizen accesses a site from inside the USA, the GPDR does not apply. That’s also why these sites can use geo-blocking without knowing who accesses their site (for some definition of ‘can’. Technically they can’t because geo-blocking can’t be perfect. If you access a site from the EU through a VPN in the USA, the GDPR still applies)

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#100

“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”.

Why do companies even bother writing that?

They clearly don't care, if they did that box wouldn't even be there.

Sites like Imgur are the absolute worst. "We care about your privacy" and presents you with a list of 1200 companies they share information with.

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