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It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
I live in Europe after growing up in the States. Every now and then, a link to an interesting news article is suggested to me. Clicking the link, I see this text:
Our European visitors are important to us.
This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we
work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
For my European friends, try a link like <www.everythinglubbock.com> or <www.tristatehomepage.com> or <www.khon2.com> or <www.wtrf.com> or <www.wnct.com> or <www.fox46.com> ... or many of the other "local" news sources in the U.S. It's important to note: While these sites cover news in a particular region, we'd need to start calling each McDonald's a local burger joint under this classification.
At the bottom of each page: <https://www.nexstar.tv https://www.nexstar.tv> - If you click this link, you are not geoblocked! In fact, there are a ton of statistics showing just how many resources this media group has at their disposal to address releasing news articles to Europe. Save a click. It's 4 billion USD revenue, over 100 news sites and TV stations, and a reach into two-thirds of American households. This is no mom and pop operation. They just don't---or maybe can't---care.
I only focused on one media group, but there are others. Here's a news article from the same year GDPR began enforcement two years after its introduction in 2016: <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44248448 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44248448>
A little has changed, but not much! Chicago Tribune is finally available. NY Daily News? Can't access. Baltimore Sun or Orlando Sentinel? Also, no.
"Why are you complaining?" you might ask. "What is your goal?"
Besides the obvious---I'd like to read about the communities of my friends and former neighbors---I want two outcomes:
First, any giant search engine company with a news subdomain and 100,000 employees could stop suggesting/featuring geofenced articles to European residents. At least weight these results so they aren't the number one, front page feature. (Although in Google's defense, one can usually click the "Cached" button to get the linked story.)
Second, say something else. The people living across the Atlantic (and their pesky differences of opinion on privacy) can't possibly be more than an inconvenience at this point.
You are in Europe. Mind your own business.
---
Edit: First post. No idea how to get links to display properly even following "Formatting Options" instructions.
- aritmo 5y agoThis should become a meme so that those companies will think twice in using that phrasing.
- pydry 5y agoThey'll just switch their phrasing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- axiosgunnar 5y agoIt‘s such an abhorrent marketing style of talking. "Your life is important to us. Therefore we must kill you.“
- coretx 5y ago"Our Business is life itself" ~Umbrella Corporation
- 6f8986c3 5y agoIt is a very safe assumption to make that anything you see or hear in media means the exact opposite.
- dxdm 5y agoIncluding your comment, I suppose? ;)
- PennRobotics 5y agoCoincidentally, the more I think about publishing to HN, the more nervous I get about my own data trail.
- jahnu 5y agoNot mine.* *With apologies to The Life of Brian
- user-the-name 5y agoIt is absolutely, in no way whatsoever, even close to a safe assumption. It is, in fact, what people who are far, far gone into conspiracy theory madness think. Again, this is not a reasonable thing to think. It is bordering on mental illness.
- mbg721 5y agoThe way Dilbert put it was "Your call is important to us...please hold while we ignore it."
- 5y ago
- draw_down 5y agoJeez, what a mess. To extend the McDonald’s analogy, when McDonald’s is serving its American customers, it doesn’t heed European laws about beef and potatoes. Because those laws are irrelevant to them, they have no bearing on McDonald’s making money (again in the context of serving their American customers). McDonald’s is never going to check what Brussels says about dairy before they make a milkshake in Spokane. Sorry. My friend, that couple of sentences you’re so wound up about means more or less exactly what you’ve said at the end. Businesses aren’t in the business of giving a shit about things that don’t affect their business. You’re upset that they don’t word it more bluntly? Really? Actions have consequences is my response. Sorry you all didn’t get the consequences you wanted. But it’s very frustrating the childish way people on HN approach these issues. Zero material analysis or thinking, always pointedly naive idealism of this type: “well you SAID you care about Europeans”- come on. I’m begging you all to take the next step and think through the actual forces at play, instead of banging on with the churlishness. The way this works is very simple- law is introduced, business figures out the easiest way to deal with it and get back to what they were doing, rinse and repeat. Maybe the European search engines do a better job at this. You could give them a try.
- senko 5y agoThis: > McDonald’s is never going to check what Brussels says about dairy before they make a milkshake in Spokane. Sorry. conflicts with this: > law is introduced, business figures out the easiest way to deal with it and get back to what they were doing, rinse and repeat. So which is it? If they care about Brussels, then they are willing to go the extra mile. If they don't care, why put up the block anyways?
- PennRobotics 5y agoAmen. If a court in the EU fines the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, what is stopping the Chronicle from replying, "lol ok." and continuing to not care?
- anticristi 5y agoI think this works if you are small. If you are large, you might have a branch or subsidiary in EEA which may get fined or whose assets might get frozen.
- raverbashing 5y agoI always read this as: "Our European visitors are important to us BUT vacuuming all your data and selling to multiple bidders is importanter" You wanna be obnoxious? Sure, go ahead, but I'll dislike your site more (and I have adblock so I have no qualms in accepting). Wanna pretend you're compliant by having an obvious non-compliant "solution" and think that will shield your responsibility? Now I'll just hate you and will probably bounce off your site
- roenxi 5y agoThey're serving you a web-page regardless. It probably isn't the data as much as they don't want to run afoul of EU law. Breaking the law is a generally considered a big mistake and regardless of the stereotyping about businesses they can be pretty timid when dealing with governments.
- raverbashing 5y agoSure, I have more respect for the ones that 451 it than for the ones that pretend (very obnoxiously) to be compliant.
- Nextgrid 5y ago> Breaking the law is a generally considered a big mistake Except when it's about breaching the GDPR. In this case it's considered "business as usual" and Google and Facebook successfully get away with it.
- denton-scratch 5y agoBut they are breaking the law. "Accept/Ask me later" is in violation of the GDPR.
- MereInterest 5y agoExactly this. Every time I read about GDPR compliance, it feels like a very well-designed set of guidelines that are easy to follow ... IF you aren't stalking users. The complaints about it have the same tone as the Guild of Assassins complaining that laws against murder are really hard to comply with in their industry. Of course they are, and that's the point. -------------- Hypothetical conversation with a Malicious Advertising Website: MAW: Can I stalk my users without telling them? GDPR: No, you must have consent to track users. MAW: So I can assume I have consent because they're using my site? GDPR: No, the consent must be explicit. MAW: Got it, I'll put it somewhere in the fine print of the terms of service. GDPR: Uninformed consent doesn't count. Fine print doesn't count as informing users. MAW: Okay, so I'll have a banner with an obvious "accept" button and several hidden steps to opt out. GDPR: Nope, it must be just as easy to retract permission as to grant it. If it's a single step to accept, then it must be a single step to reject. MAW: In that case I'll have the "reject" button kick them off the site. GDPR: Consent must be freely given, and having a service be conditional on consent is coercion. Consent to track may only be given as a gift, and not as an exchange. MAW: WAAAH!! This is so hard!! --------- Hypothetical conversation with a Non-Malicious Website: NMW: I don't track any information about visitors to this site, and only serve non-targeted advertisements. GDPR: Sounds good, go right ahead. NMW: Say, I want to make a "To-Do List" site. Do I need to warn users that I'm going to remember the to-do items for them? GDPR: Nope, no issue there. That's necessary for the service to function. NMW: Huh, this is really simple.
- matthewmorgan 5y agoSo should the whole world obey every diktat that comes from the EU? Whether GDPR is good or bad, it's an EU law, not an international or American one.
- lima 5y agoThe complaint is about saying "we care" when they clearly don't. It's perfectly reasonable for US media to block European users rather than deal with GDPR compliance, but why not be honest about it?
- workallday21 5y agoSorry, I wasn't paying attention as I have to fill my FACTA form.
- DangerousPie 5y agoMaybe the cost of GDPR compliance just isn't worth the small amount of revenue that they might make from European visitors? US visitors are probably much more 'valuable' in terms of advertisement revenue, and also much more likely to be a subscriber. And I say this as a European myself. It sucks that I have to jump through hoops to access some sites but I can't really blame them.
- CogitoCogito 5y agoI'm not really offended that I can't see all content from Europe, but the idiotic newspeak like "Our European visitors are important to us." is almost offensive. I don't see why they aren't just honest.
- pydry 5y agoToxic positivity. It's a pervasive feature of American culture.
- peytn 5y agoI think this is more an example of what we call “bullshit.” There’s a lot of it.
- mbg721 5y agoIn America we particularly have a lot of "bullshit we think protects us from lawsuits even if it really doesn't".
- KSteffensen 5y agoThe concept of supermarket greeter blows my mind. As a customer this would be a reason to NOT go to that supermarket. As a potential employee I would have to be starving before I took that job.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago“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”.
- Typhon 5y agoIt used to be the most common lie was "I have read the EULA". Nowadays the most common lie is "we care about your privacy" or possibly "we get it, you hate ads".
- feketegy 5y agoHow 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.
- anticristi 5y agoNoyb.eu is working to fix this: https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-aims-end-cookie-banner-terror-and-issues-more-500-gdpr-complaints?mtc=mu https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-aims-end-cookie-banner-terror-and-is...
- unishark 5y agoI 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.
- tannhaeuser 5y agoThat's how it's been handled for nearly 100% of the sites I went to for the last two years (that actually do contain ads, or use tracking for pointless internal analytics, that is). Or a variation thereof similarly letting you switch off most tracking using no more than two clicks.
- kristaps 5y agoI make it a point to click "reject all" if the initial dialog only allows accepting some implicit default preferences.
- anm89 5y agoIs this really what's considered good content on HN at this point? I come here specifically to avoid junk like this. Disappointing.
- redis_mlc 5y agoSeveral times I've said that HN should block European IP addresses. Nothing they have to say is relevant in the US. And pay your own damn defense budgets.
- PennRobotics 5y agoI'm a U.S. citizen and veteran working for a company with many customers the U.S. and friends working in every reach of the country. I didn't realize I'm not part of the tech scene because of my location. Alas, I have paid and do still pay my country's defense budget---financially, physically, emotionally.
- dang 5y agoYou broke the site guidelines with this. They ask: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you wouldn't mind reviewing and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
- PennRobotics 5y agoUnderstood. Thanks. :)
- workallday21 5y agoI'm from Europe and would love this. Let us have our own forums!
- KSteffensen 5y agoSorry to break your bubble.
- throwaway287391 5y agoWhat I don't understand is, why are these local US news sites required to comply with GDPR? I wouldn't think they'd have any obligation to follow it (or any possible recourse for not doing so) unless they have business operations in the EU. Are these local news sites in fact all owned by multinationals that do have operations in the EU? Edit: I'm getting downvoted -- just in case it helps to clarify, I'm not trying to say anything anti-GDPR here... I'm just genuinely surprised these ostensibly US-only companies feel obligated to follow it and genuinely asking why? Is there an actual legal risk to non-compliance for them? Given the already low level of effort just to detect an EU-based IP address and show the patronizing error message, it seems like they must have had some motivation to even do that much and I'm just wondering what that was.
- hugosbaseball 5y agoThe vast majority of "local" news sites are in fact owned by just a handful of media conglomerates.
- slavoingilizov 5y agoGDPR applies whenever you're providing services to EU citizens, regardless of where you have operations. If you want those people to read your stuff, it applies to you. And before you say that's crazy, look at US tax laws.
- anticristi 5y agoAlso, US Foreign Corruption Practices Act.
- tzs 5y ago> GDPR applies whenever you're providing services to EU citizens That's a common misconception. GDPR applies to the data of people "in the Union". There is no mention of citizens at all in GDPR. If someone is not an EU citizen but is in the Union, it applies. If someone is an EU citizen but is not in the Union, it does not apply.
- koehr 5y ago
- causality0 5y agoBefore GDPR passed I heard nothing but "I don't want to patronize a site that doesn't want to respect my privacy" and "we don't need sites that won't follow basic rules like this". Well you got your wish. Your internet is no longer polluted with these reprehensible site owners. Yet people continue to bitch and moan.
- PennRobotics 5y agoRead the thread. They can keep their news, but it's _pushed_ to me by Big Tech. Then, the news sources have the nerve to say, "Thanks for coming. Get out!" It's the 0% APR that virtually nobody qualifies for at the dealership. Don't suggest content I want but can't have.
- readflaggedcomm 5y agoNews aggregators hardly qualify as "big tech".
- PennRobotics 5y agonews.google.com is owned by Alphabet.
- readflaggedcomm 5y agoAnd Joe Biden owns a dog. Dogs still don't qualify as government property.
- slavoingilizov 5y agoThe moan is about the language used, not the availability of the site.
- strangeattractr 5y agoMaybe the blocked content is just divine retribution for the abhorrent cookie consent buttons we all have to press 20 times a day now.
- tester34 5y agoMany sites show cookie consent when they don't have to. You don't have to show cookie consent when you use cookies purely for "technical stuff" - e.g cookie based authentication. >Operational cookies >There are some cookies that we have to include in order for certain web pages to function. For this reason, they do not require your consent. In particular: >authentication cookies >technical cookies required by certain IT systems https://ec.europa.eu/info/cookies_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/cookies_en
- mbg721 5y agoI've never even been to Europe, and I still get them. What are we Americans, chopped liver?
- alpaca128 5y agoLooks like sites "care about you" just as much as they do about Europeans.
- zinekeller 5y agoMaybe because everyone (According to Facebook anyway, which is very not true) there wants to track - GDPR ain't really about the cookies, it's about the mismatch of corporate America's desire to track versus Europe's desire to not get tracked. Heck, American companies are breaking American law, at least in California.
- creshal 5y agoConsent is only necessary for cookies that aren't in the interest of the user (session cookies, other cookies set to fulfil user requests). You only "have to" press these because a lot of websites decide they'd rather torture users with popups than stop tracking personal data.
- 5y ago
- vincentmarle 5y agoI’m the opposite: I grew up in Europe but live in the States. There’s a ton of European websites and content I can’t access from here. While this may suck for you personally I don’t think American companies (especially local news companies) should have to comply with invasive and expensive European privacy laws. Especially after forcing the entire world to adopt useless and annoying cookie walls. If you really want to access those articles you can use a VPN like the rest of the world does when they are accessing geo restricted content. GDPR has never really been a reasonable law to begin with.
- Symbiote 5y agoCan you give some examples of European websites which are unavailable in the USA?
- cl3misch 5y agoThe argument in the post is that they are all from the same, large media company: > At the bottom of each page: <https://www.nexstar.tv https://www.nexstar.tv>
- PennRobotics 5y agoI don't believe they need to comply, either. Just stop saying people living in Europe are important. They obviously are not.
- denton-scratch 5y agoNobody asked for cookie walls, which anyway don't bring sites into compliance. The cookie walls are erected by companies that are trying to shirk GDPR responsibilities. They can avoid these responsibilities by refusing to serve content in the EU. That's their prerogative (although it is discriminatory, and thefore violates GDPR). And if they think they are out-of-reach for EU law, they can just ignore the GDPR; but watch out, similar regulations are coming to a jurisdiction near you. Whether the GDPR is "reasonable" depends on your perspective; regulated parties always think that the regulations under which they trade are unreasonable. [Edit: qualified the "their prerogative" bit]
- anothernewdude 5y agoThis is what your politicians asked for.
- Hamuko 5y agoA bunch of Americans lying to us?
- PennRobotics 5y ago...to be told we're important?
- bradleyjg 5y agoLawmakers 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.
- PennRobotics 5y agoWords are free. Stop saying banned customers are great. This is my argument.
- jsbdk 5y agoWriting words takes time and effort. Time and effort cost money.
- PennRobotics 5y ago%s/are important to us/cannot view this content/g
- koheripbal 5y agoThe frustration in the EU is the inability to access the content, not the verbiage of the deny message.
- zinekeller 5y agoThe user here just wants honesty - a "As a local American* media, we cannot afford the additional costs of GDPR compliance. As such, this content is not available to EU/EEA." That's it. Not "We are evaluating options to deliver your favorite [sic] content to EEA." when they already decided to no longer server Europeans. * "local American media" WTF. Almost all of you are large corporates.
- drstewart 5y agoOr maybe they are planning to give you localised [sic] content at some point and just haven't prioritised [sic] it yet?
- thom 5y agoI have been very grateful for GDPR, because on lots of sites the very first question is "do I care enough about this content to try and click a bunch of buttons?" Nine times out of ten the answer is no and I just close the tab without reading the article, and I genuinely think I'm happier for it. I certainly have more time.
- rognjen 5y agoThen pay.
- playcache 5y agoPay for what, they are all free sites OP listed?
- creshal 5y agoPay to… buy out the news company? I guess?
- zinekeller 5y agoAh yes, another headline-only reader.
- rognjen 5y ago> 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.
- rognjen 5y agoFor a news source that does care and have the resources to implement GDPR compliance.
- samizdis 5y ago> Every now and then, a link to an interesting news article is suggested to me. If the link looks like something worth the effort, plug it in to archive.is and read the output there. Or try it via outline.com instead. These tend to work for most text-based articles/sites, and archive.is often breezes right through paywalls, too.
- PennRobotics 5y agoThanks for the advice. To load one of the Google News links took more than 30 seconds on archive.is but eventually worked. Outline did not work with the links as-is. In short, this is not a comfortable workaround, but it is a working alternative.
- jokethrowaway 5y agoI'm European and I block EU customers as well (mainly for VATMOSS though, more than GDPR, albeit I'm not sure whether I'm GDPR ready or not). Simply put, it's a very low margin and low time investment business on my side and I'd rather work on something that can make me more money than to implement the required changes to support Europe's regulatory plat du jour. Having worked in big businesses, even if they have the money to spend, they may face other organisational issues. Implementing any change in big businesses is not easy and takes significant more time than you would imagine. As you correctly say, I'm sure they evaluated the cost benefit of EU visitors and concluded it wasn't as high as the cost of getting things done. For news, that means that people will be able to access less independent content, or maybe just access what is visible behind the walled gardens of social media. For ecommerce (and VATMOSS), stores just moved to Amazon / eBay so they don't have to deal with the complexity. As usual, regulators screwed all us up pretending to target big business (whether it's privacy or paying sales tax) and dealt a massive blow to all the small competitors of big business.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zerof1l 5y agoUse VPN. And use browser extension like uBlock Origin. You can access blocked content and you get privacy.
- antihero 5y agoThis is a solution for an end user, and besides the point.
- flyinghamster 5y agoI'd love to be able to drop NoScript and uBlock Origin, but the web has become such a shitshow that they're vital security tools. But it's ridiculous that we have to go to such insane lengths, for privacy or even for access. Noscript, in particular, can be very annoying, but it saves me from a lot of worse annoyances. This also crosses over to the crawling horror of IoT, where every device maker wants your sweet, sweet data. Oh, sure, we can throw our IoT devices on a carefully-firewalled VLAN - provided we have networking gear with that capability and the knowledge to use it, neither of which is likely for the average consumer. I never imagined I'd live in a real-life cyberpunk dystopia when I first read "Johnny Mnemonic" in Omni so many years ago, but here we are.
- mkl 5y ago> No idea how to get links to display properly even following "Formatting Options" instructions. You can't have links in text posts like this. HN stories are a link or text. From https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc: "Urls become links, except in the text field of a submission." To make proper links in comments, just put "https:// https://" in front of them so they're URLs. "<" and ">" are for unusual URLs that get mis-detected with their surrounding text, and they are hardly ever needed.
- PennRobotics 5y agoOops. Even in seven sentences, I missed a detail. :( Thanks; noted for the future.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 5y agoIt’s mostly local papers in rural areas. They are trying to proof some point, and happen to be mostly just not very interesting for European readers. So cutting them off is cheap.
- workallday21 5y agoI think the blocking of EU visitors is super interesting ideologically: 1. Imagine communist countries blocking access to local news. What would that look like? Well, censorship and maybe ways of hiding the abuse of the local regime to the outside world! 2. GDPR doesn't even ask for much: show us the news, show us your ads, just don't slurp any info about the visit. You know, like a TV station: just print some pixels. But apparently the whole business model can't work like that anymore. Spying is the only way they can make any money.
- korijn 5y agoThe reality is that "Outside US support" is usually the lower priority step-two of any project, because it is easier to make more money inside the US, for US companies, for example because of (a lack of) regulations like GDPR. (Source: I am a European working for a US company) I don't think they entirely don't care, they just care more about (perhaps need to) making money fast than serving a global audience.
- disobeycaesar 5y agoJust gotta ride the VPN all day long
- gen220 5y agoSeeking the wisdom of the HN crowd: Does RSS, with the full article content in each item's description, avoid the "problem" of GDPR compliance? Maybe it'll become "cheaper" for global content creators to go back to old-fashioned content-targeted ads, which can be distributed through RSS [1], among other domains. Placing the ads will be more expensive [2] (no more than it used to be), but it might be cheaper than guaranteeing GDPR compliance with the adware they've grown cozy with recently, and it opens up the EU as an available market. [1]: for one example of this already working, podcasts are distributed via RSS, and have a rapidly growing advertising market around them: https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-podcast-ad-spending-surpass-1-billion-next-year https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-podcast-ad-spending-sur.... [2]: apparently, most podcast ads are placed with a human in the loop (only 8% are placed programmatically). there might be a product idea here, in building a "static, content-targeted ad" exchange.
- blindmute 5y agoEU said, "Do this or you can't do business in our countries." These websites said, "Ok" and didn't do business in those countries. Maybe kind of annoying, but this is explicitly the price you pay for more privacy.
- ric2b 5y agoYes, but the complaint is about the awful PR messaging of "We care about you". Just be honest and be done with it.