I worked on the same script using CloudFlare workers just a while ago, if someone is interested:
https://gist.github.com/botsplash/bf494ea9e95d945229a0a667a5...
GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
241–250 of 1001 posts
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is the way the law, prosecution and judgement works. If you violate GDPR and the EU prosecutes you and you don't even show up to court and there is judgement against you and you are fined, the EU can try to get paid from your bank. That's how law, prosecution and judgement work in America too. How else would it work? Why would anyone obey any regulation or ever show up to court otherwise? That being said, t…
Playing Devil's advocate, there are 193 countries in the UN; is it reasonable to ask site owners to keep abreast of the Internet laws passed in each one, and spend a couple of days for each, even if you just serve your compatriots? I'm biased for the GDPR, since I think every site should follow its principles regardless of legal obligation, but I don't think the rationale you're proposing is scalable.
Laws are made with physical borders in mind. Digital world doesn't have those borders. But it seems that politicians are expecting those borders to work.
I'm not even sure about sane way to map IP address to country. There are some geolocation services, but I doubt that they are 100% precise and probably paid. Also if I'm using geolocation service passing IP of the incoming request, does that mean that I'm already violated someone's privacy? This is weird.
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#243I keep seeing these posts on how to block European users to avoid the GDPR. As a citizen of Europe, seeing these posts consistently making it to the front page is disappointing. It would seem that Silicon Valley perceives the GDPR as more of a hindrance than an opportunity to offer users better privacy. Nothing has been learned.
It's not about privacy, its about poorly written regulation that leaves too much vagueness because its based on principles rather than hard rules. Good intentions are not enough, there must be clear paths to implementation and verification. Perhaps that should've been fixed instead of wondering why so many companies don't really want to deal with it. It will also do just about nothing in regards to the major companie…
What you have described is _exactly_ how regulation works. It's still a hundred times better than what most countries in the world produce, since it's designed around the average human and not a megaco.
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#244I keep seeing these posts on how to block European users to avoid the GDPR. As a citizen of Europe, seeing these posts consistently making it to the front page is disappointing. It would seem that Silicon Valley perceives the GDPR as more of a hindrance than an opportunity to offer users better privacy. Nothing has been learned.
I feel the EU regulators could stand to learn something. If EU citizens are small portion of your users, and your tasked with parsing this document
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX...
just blocking them doesn't seem like that bad of an idea, especially with the fines involved.
I think the things that bother me is:
1) A College student working on a side project with no revenue are treated the same as some massive multi-national.
2) It's a foreign requirement that feels like a violation of sovereignty. Most business/startup owners complain about there being too much domestic regulations, now we have to worry about things outside of our own countries -- that also can come into conflict with our domestic tax authorities on things like data retention. An international agreement would be entirely different.
3) The GDPR requires clear and concise language, but have done nothing of the sort when writing the regulations. For most websites outside of the EU, could they not have produced a concise 1-2 page infographic produced by the regulators themselves?
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about privacy, its about poorly written regulation that leaves too much vagueness because its based on principles rather than hard rules. Good intentions are not enough, there must be clear paths to implementation and verification. Perhaps that should've been fixed instead of wondering why so many companies don't really want to deal with it. It will also do just about nothing in regards to the major companie…
As a French guy, these type of comments make me smile. The GDPR is basically just the implementation of the French law "Informatique et Liberté" into the European Level. (You can read on HN many Germans saying that it's actually the implementation of the Datenschutzgesetzt. The truth is: these two laws are extremely similar.) This law has been in application since 1978 [1]. And in 2018, we have adtech companies like…
You mean Criteo the company that has lost over 50% of their valuation since last year because of cookie and consent issues? Yea it's going really well for them. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CRTO/chart?p=CRTO
The difference is that France is insignificant in the adtech market. The real money is in the US and spread out across Europe, with Asia soon to overtake. The existing rules you point to weren't affecting global operations where Criteo and others made their money.
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#246The amount of dishonest conversation in this thread coming from supposed "hackers" is extremely aggravating. These laws have existed in various forms across several European countries for a few decades. It's now a standard across all of the EU. This is to say, that these have been tried, tested, found to be functional and useful; these regulations now have proper surface area coverage.
This is good for both companies and users. It gives companies clear goals and policies for how to treat users, their data, and what their users want to do with their data.
I think what we're seeing is a light shining brightly on some pretty scummy practices. It's understandable why developers who rely on user ignorance to make a profit/revenue would be bummed about this, because these regulations are correctly placing the burden on you, the developer, to be forthright and honest about what you're doing with people's personal and private information.
To developers who don't want to do business in an open and honest manner, who rely on low brow tactics with user data, who didn't have the good sense to know what was coming and plan for it: Good riddance. Try again.
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#247Any recommendations or resources for what micro internet sites should do? I'm thinking in scale from website with my picture and some software projects on it, to micro free webservice like uptime checker, to $1 seating chart maker.
Block EU is totally reasonable for all these. Is it necessary?
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is the EU going to target American banks of American businesses and try to extract fines? You mean like America? That time when the USA decided to enforce their embargo against Cuba by intercepting a payment from one of the Nordics for a bunch of Cuban cigars? No, that's unlikely. > Is the EU going to extradite owners of these businesses? Extremely unlikely, besides that would require the cooperation of the other c…
>> Are EU courts going to issue default judgements on businesses and individuals? > Against individuals: Unlikely, but it could happen AFAIK IANAL: GDPR doesn't apply to individuals that e.g. host mastodon instance.
Agreed, but execs of companies violating the law are also individuals, and those were the individuals I had in mind.
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
It actually isn't clear that it doesn't, as best I can tell. I don't have the text in question in front of me, but one of the questions I've asked and haven't gotten a solid answer on is - who is covered by GDPR? Is it only EU citizens residing in the EU, or EU citizens generally? If it's the latter, then someone with both US and German citizenship could be covered even if they've never been to the EU.
This is a very dangerous interpretation. Let me tell you why: this opens the door for someone, let's say China, to say that their laws apply to Chinese nationals outside of China. You know, censorship and the rest. While GDPR is a good idea, its legal impact can only be for business conducted within EU boundaries, or we are going to open up a Pandora's Box like this.
You mean: like giving fines to ANY company doing business with Iran just because some US President decided to cancel its own part of an international treaty...? ;-)
Come on: you're whining but you're doing that kind of extra-territorial stuff for decades!!!
Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
#250To offer a non-dev perspective on Hn, it feels like tech companies are really trying to annoy us users with GDPR updates in an effort to nurture opposition to similar proposed regulations in the future. I hope it doesn't work.
I love GDPR, getting rid of the WHOIS database stuff alone is enough to make me a huge fan. The option to delete my data is also amazing.