GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers • Hacker News Board

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#51

Post by outside1234 » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

nrdgrl wrote: post #34

sp332 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're the third person to ask this and I'd like to ask you: is this idea coming from a specific source? The law, like any other EU law, obviously does not apply outside the EU. It applies to companies that do business in the EU (even if they are based outside), but it can't apply to companies that don't do business there. https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

GDPR applies to all EU citizens. It doesn't matter if the citizen is accessing the web site from the eu or another country. Blocking people in the EU doesn't block all eu citizens from accessing your product/service.

People keep saying this but its not true. The EU has no jurisdiction outside of the EU. If both the user and site are outside of the EU at the time of the transaction, they can not make claims, regardless of citizenship.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#52

Post by jacquesm » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #40

jacquesm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EU citizens have turned into pests overnight. That's an excellent attitude to take towards your users.

Let's try another formulation. Valuable, dear, beloved users for which the business has boundless sympathy, empathy, and compassion are now awkwardly the source of compliance concerns for which the costs outstrip the reasonably expected revenues enabled by compliance. While compassion is unlimited, it is possible the budgets and time may not be. Better?

Much better.

But I wonder what changed since last week because those compliance concerns were just as valid last week. Or do you mean to imply the company knowingly broke the law for a couple of years just because they could?

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#53

Post by ThJ » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

I 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.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#54

Post by orf » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

outside1234 wrote: post #45

logronoide wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the author of the post, and yes: blocking 500 million geolocated people is crazy. That's not the spirit of the law. I just wrote the post because if you want to overkill and you are lazy, you can follow our recipe to 'implement' GDPR. I just wanted to be sarcastic and also show how easy to implement Cloudworkers + Apility.io.

On the contrary, if you are running a business where 99% of your customers are outside of the EU, its totally rational versus opening yourself up to massive liability.

You need to purge that 1% customer data though. If you're accepting EU citizens data through any channel - another business, them using a VPN, via smoke signals, you need to comply.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#55

Post by tener » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

I think GDPR applies to EU citizens no matter where they are? So while this will work for most cases, it doesn't really give you immunity?

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#56

Post by AlfeG » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

smallbigfish wrote: post #47

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking 500 million geolocated people is crazy. That's not the spirit of the law. No crazier than thinking you have to comply if you have no connection to the EU.

If you have no connection with EU why do you collect personal data from the EU citizens? If you don't collect why worry?

What do "collect" mean. Its too broad to comply.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#57

Post by logronoide » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

dividuum wrote: post #46

logronoide wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see the average latency here: https://status.apility.io But Cloudflare has servers very close to our endpoints around the world, so I guess We are working hard to reduce the amount of time to establish the connection. It's about 80% of the time of the request.

Isn't there a Cloudflare geo-location header that you can trivially activate and map to EU/Non-EU? That would result in no additional latency except for the worker itself.

Cloudflare has a country header. So yes, an easy way to block millions of users is checking that header against the list of countries applying GDPR.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#58

Post by logronoide » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:47 PM UTC

ThJ wrote: post #53

I 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 wrote the blog post to show how Dilbert's boss would solve GDPR for his company.

Don't take it seriously.

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#59

Post by gnode » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

tener wrote: post #55

I think GDPR applies to EU citizens no matter where they are? So while this will work for most cases, it doesn't really give you immunity?

No; it applies to EU residents, and they don't have to be citizens. From Article 3 (2):

"This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union"

Re: GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

#60

Post by ryanwaggoner » Fri, May 25, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

smallbigfish wrote: post #47

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking 500 million geolocated people is crazy. That's not the spirit of the law. No crazier than thinking you have to comply if you have no connection to the EU.

If you have no connection with EU why do you collect personal data from the EU citizens? If you don't collect why worry?

They keep sending it to me. Apparently, even asking them not to and trying to block them is not enough for some people.

Just to be clear, I treat all my users fairly and protect their data, and I am not intentionally targeting any EU users with anything I do online.