4 ms·

> How hard can it be to build a publishing website in a privacy-respecting manner? It's been a while since GDPR was introduced. I can understand why a newspape

> How hard can it be to build a publishing website in a privacy-respecting manner? It's been a while since GDPR was introduced. I can understand why a newspaper whose subscriber base is in southern California would not want to spend the time and money necessary to comply with European privacy regulations. It's unlikely that the benefits for the business would outweigh the costs.

ErrantX 8y ago
I suppose the implicit question is more; what are they doing that is likely to be in violation of some (relatively mundane, tbf) privacy regulations. The only thing gdpr really changed was the size of the fine...
- drb91 8y ago
  Using a cookie for non-essential functionality would be enough.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  > what are they doing that is likely to be in violation of some (relatively mundane, tbf) privacy regulations. Why should they even bother spending resources understanding those regulations? The decision is pretty straightforward for them. Don't like it? Go complain with the regulators.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Uh, obvious reasons? The fact that they block EU visitors might not hurt them, but the fact that those people complain on sites used by US visitors will.
    - ucaetano 8y ago
      > will Nah, people whinning on hackernews is pretty much irrelevant.
vladd 8y ago
> It's unlikely that the benefits for the business would outweigh the costs. On the Internet, nobody cares where you are located. The fact that one cannot be bothered to serve their bytes, at basically marginal networking costs (and some fixed one-time investment) to hundreds of millions of potential additional readers shows bad business judgement and poor leadership.
- twblalock 8y ago
  > The fact that one cannot be bothered to serve their bytes, at basically marginal network cost (and some fixed one-time investment) to hundreds of millions of potential additional readers shows bad business judgement and poor leadership. The LA Times makes money from subscriptions. How many EU citizens do you think would purchase LA Times subscriptions if the site complied with the GDPR?
  - vladd 8y ago
    Subscriptions is the end-result. To get there you need many things: brand, reputation, good crawling, incoming links from authoritative sites. All of these are predicated on the idea of a global Internet. If webmasters in Europe stop linking to you, Americans traveling in EU lose your trust, and EU-hosted search engine crawlers figure you don't exist, then you start to have some problems. A good businessman is able to change its assumptions when the world around him changes. In 1980, it might have made sense to limit your newspaper audience in the area where you lived. In 2010+, due to the Internet, the main cost of a newspaper consists in the work performed by the writer to produce the actual content. When the world around you gives you basically free infrastructure to send those bytes to another continent against a one-time investment of assessing and fixing your site for compliance, you just don't say no.
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      Assuming what you say is true, would one expect prominent newspaper websites that are GDPR-compliant and accessible from the EU to be doing better financially than prominent newspaper websites that aren't? Is that the case?

ErrantX 8y ago

I suppose the implicit question is more; what are they doing that is likely to be in violation of some (relatively mundane, tbf) privacy regulations. The only thing gdpr really changed was the size of the fine...

drb91 8y ago
Using a cookie for non-essential functionality would be enough.
ucaetano 8y ago
> what are they doing that is likely to be in violation of some (relatively mundane, tbf) privacy regulations. Why should they even bother spending resources understanding those regulations? The decision is pretty straightforward for them. Don't like it? Go complain with the regulators.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Uh, obvious reasons? The fact that they block EU visitors might not hurt them, but the fact that those people complain on sites used by US visitors will.
  - ucaetano 8y ago
    > will Nah, people whinning on hackernews is pretty much irrelevant.

vladd 8y ago

> It's unlikely that the benefits for the business would outweigh the costs. On the Internet, nobody cares where you are located. The fact that one cannot be bothered to serve their bytes, at basically marginal networking costs (and some fixed one-time investment) to hundreds of millions of potential additional readers shows bad business judgement and poor leadership.

twblalock 8y ago
> The fact that one cannot be bothered to serve their bytes, at basically marginal network cost (and some fixed one-time investment) to hundreds of millions of potential additional readers shows bad business judgement and poor leadership. The LA Times makes money from subscriptions. How many EU citizens do you think would purchase LA Times subscriptions if the site complied with the GDPR?
- vladd 8y ago
  Subscriptions is the end-result. To get there you need many things: brand, reputation, good crawling, incoming links from authoritative sites. All of these are predicated on the idea of a global Internet. If webmasters in Europe stop linking to you, Americans traveling in EU lose your trust, and EU-hosted search engine crawlers figure you don't exist, then you start to have some problems. A good businessman is able to change its assumptions when the world around him changes. In 1980, it might have made sense to limit your newspaper audience in the area where you lived. In 2010+, due to the Internet, the main cost of a newspaper consists in the work performed by the writer to produce the actual content. When the world around you gives you basically free infrastructure to send those bytes to another continent against a one-time investment of assessing and fixing your site for compliance, you just don't say no.
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    Assuming what you say is true, would one expect prominent newspaper websites that are GDPR-compliant and accessible from the EU to be doing better financially than prominent newspaper websites that aren't? Is that the case?