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> You aren't doing business unless you're accepting payments/selling/shipping things to people in the EU. I wonder how ads play into all this. E.g. are people

> You aren't doing business unless you're accepting payments/selling/shipping things to people in the EU. I wonder how ads play into all this. E.g. are people who watch an ad on YouTube considered YouTube customers? Are they considered customers of the ad company? My concern is that we will see more (non-EU) companies implement something where users "pay" for services/features by watching ads. I do also wonder how it then affects the ad companies if they collect personal information about the user. Does the user count as a "customer" if the ad company is the one paying?

PeterisP 9y ago
The simple answer to that is that the advertisers pay you to show ads to EU users because they want to get money from EU users; so these advertisers are/have to be GDPR compliant, especially if they're using user information to target ads, and they'll have to be sure that this user information is legal for them to use. The advertising networks are clearly doing business in EU as they're getting paid by these advertisers - so all the major advertising networks will have to be GDPR compliant. So in this regard, the ads (and user info used for these ads) shown to EU users will (in practice) have to be GDPR compliant even if your site doesn't care about it, because everyone who'd want to pay for these ads has to be compliant.
- epicide 9y ago
  > advertisers pay you to show ads to EU users because they want to get money from EU users; so these advertisers are/have to be GDPR compliant This is the part I'm not sure is true. Sure, if the ad agency's company motto is "delivering ads to EU users since XXXX", they obviously have to be compliant, but what if they are a US-based ad agency and none of the companies selling them ad space are in the EU? How many layers does one need to circumvent this?
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    I'm not talking about ad agencies, but about the actual advertisers. Why would a company buy ad impressions if they're not selling to these users? Almost every ad I see is from some company that is actually eager to sell stuff to me, so they're doing business in EU, and have to be compliant. All advertisers who care about me won't be allowed to buy my data from US-based ad agencies, so even if such US-based agencies can gather the data, it's worthless, since noone would buy that.

PeterisP 9y ago

The simple answer to that is that the advertisers pay you to show ads to EU users because they want to get money from EU users; so these advertisers are/have to be GDPR compliant, especially if they're using user information to target ads, and they'll have to be sure that this user information is legal for them to use. The advertising networks are clearly doing business in EU as they're getting paid by these advertisers - so all the major advertising networks will have to be GDPR compliant. So in this regard, the ads (and user info used for these ads) shown to EU users will (in practice) have to be GDPR compliant even if your site doesn't care about it, because everyone who'd want to pay for these ads has to be compliant.

epicide 9y ago
> advertisers pay you to show ads to EU users because they want to get money from EU users; so these advertisers are/have to be GDPR compliant This is the part I'm not sure is true. Sure, if the ad agency's company motto is "delivering ads to EU users since XXXX", they obviously have to be compliant, but what if they are a US-based ad agency and none of the companies selling them ad space are in the EU? How many layers does one need to circumvent this?
- PeterisP 9y ago
  I'm not talking about ad agencies, but about the actual advertisers. Why would a company buy ad impressions if they're not selling to these users? Almost every ad I see is from some company that is actually eager to sell stuff to me, so they're doing business in EU, and have to be compliant. All advertisers who care about me won't be allowed to buy my data from US-based ad agencies, so even if such US-based agencies can gather the data, it's worthless, since noone would buy that.