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

news.ycombinator.com

181–190 of 192 posts

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

#182
post #46

Then pay.

Ah yes, another headline-only reader.

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

> Then pay.

I don't think it really fits as a response if I had only read the headline.

I do concede that my comment was more terse then necessary and not as constructive as it could have been.

My point was that the links listed looked like small free organizations that don't have the resources, or actually any other incentive. They probably have very few readers outside of their localities.

So pay for a bigger news org that does.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The GDPR requires sites not to discriminate. It is a violation to refuse to serve users because they are in Europe.

King Canute required the waves to stop. How did that work out for him?

To be fair on old Knut, his piece of seaside theatre was meant as a put-down for his flattering courtiers, who had told him he was so great he could stop the tide. He wanted to prove the opposite.

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News aggregators hardly qualify as "big tech".

news.google.com is owned by Alphabet.

And Joe Biden owns a dog. Dogs still don't qualify as government property.

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How GDPR is implemented is a total shitshow. It clearly says that it's an OPT-IN, not opt-out and one has to uncheck everything one by one. We're creating a fucking dystopia just to click on more ads.

I used to see only that, but lately I've been seeing cases where once you choose the "manage cookies" option, all the nonessential cookies are opted out by default.

I've seen that too, but a dark pattern here is pretending this is the whole truth and then hide a few hundred under a less visible "legitimate interest" tab.

Personally I use the Lockdown app which seems to block a lot, but suggestions about better alternatives are welcome.

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

#186
post #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.

> 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.

Furthermore, here in Europe everyone pays for health care for everyone to some degree so allowing people to do outrageously stupid stuff ends up increasing the tax for everyone.

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

#187

“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.

When people say “we care about global warming”, it doesn’t mean they want global warming to occur. Same with companies, they don’t want your privacy to continue either.

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

#188
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You asked: > IANAL, but can't they just word a disclaimer and checkbox? The answer is no, as far as GDPR is concerned, if they want to process and/or sell data of EU citizens or residents they have to follow some rules. I’ve no idea how the EU plans to enforce this regulation outside of the EEA, but it’s beside the point (as in it’s not what you asked)

Would this mean all a non-EU website needs to do to safely serve GDPR-bound persons is trash any data collected from them?

Or not collect it in the first place. For those newspaper blocking traffic from the EU, it may be enough to remove all trackers

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

#189
post #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 :)

Well, to properly comply you should assume no consent by default. However, most of the dialogs these days assume opt out for the main bit but there is a separate section for Legitimate Interest and you have to manually opt out of those. Is it possible you are just not noticing the separate legitimate interest section?

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

#190
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The GDPR requires sites not to discriminate. It is a violation to refuse to serve users because they are in Europe.

Laws in Europe apply to European subjects only, not the entire world. Europe has no authority to force a non-European company to serve it's subjects.

It certainly has authority to block it from doing business in the EU if they don't comply, and to back that block with legal action against employees or assets inside the region if the company keeps breaking the law.
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