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> 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

> 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. I wonder if sites will ever stop lying about this.

sokoloff 5y ago
“Important to us, but not profitable to serve.”
- chrisin2d 5y ago
  "Important, but not important enough."
- jacquesm 5y ago
  No, even profitable, it's just that they can't be bothered to disable their tracking.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    If it was profitable enough to bother, I’m sure they’d do it.
  - short12 5y ago
    If they are an American company with no presence in EU they can blatantly ignore the privacy laws
gojomo 5y ago
I wonder if Europe will ever lift its Iron GDPR Curtain to allow its residents to access free-world websites!
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Note that this curtain isn't put in place by the EU, nor that compliance with the GDPR is hard.
  - gojomo 5y ago
    It is an extra compliance cost & financial risk imposed by the EU, with essentially no benefit for the website. It also provides negligible benefit for any EU subject, compared to what the privacy-conscious users could achieve via self-help for themselves – by not registering, or clearing cookies, or using other tech measures. Have trillions (or quadrillions?) of EU cookie popups actually preserved any privacy at all? Or just wasted staff time, reader time, & trained a 'consent dialog blindness' into users worldwide?
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      It's a benefit to the public, the fact that companies go so far as to refuse to be compliant tells you how addicted to all this data they really are. The cookie popups were the wrong response to well intentioned legislation, the proper response would have been to stop using cookies, not to use these stupid banners. Functional cookies were never a problem, but tracking people indiscriminately is a problem. Consent dialog blindness is a good term, but it is caused by the makers of the consent dialogs not by the legislators. Not tracking is a viable alternative and does not require any dialogs.
      - gojomo 5y ago
        That US news sites find their EU visitors of such low value that they'd rather block them than spend to be compliant (& thus still get some aggregate or opt-in data) is a pretty strong refutation of the idea they're "addicted to all this data". What's the tangible harm of this supposed "indiscriminate tracking" - especially as compared to other burgeoning EU initiatives like demanding law-enforcement backdoors into e2e chat sessions? The consent-dialog-blindness is created by the regulatory demands for their constant re-display, for negligible benefit. If not even asking for cookies was 'viable', major sites – who have far better understanding of the relative tradeoffs than the regulators – would've gone that way. Can you name any that chose that 'viable' path? Are they winning their categories with that 'viability'? You know what else is 'viable'? User self help. Clearing/disabling cookies. Running a privacy-protecting browser, like say Brave. The EU could've protected a lot more privacy, without wasting the world's time & burning-out people's attention, if it had coached people into self-protection, rather than threatening businesses worldwide with fines. But hey, haughty mega-super-state's gotta do mega-super-stating.
- short12 5y ago
  You can just ignore it if you are not in the EU
  - gojomo 5y ago
    These websites, based on their own internal analyses, have concluded ignoring it completely is not safe for them. But also, they know that implementing (& maintaining!) compliance, moreso than a simple block, has nonzero cost, while EU readers provide them negligible benefit. So they take the easy way out, given the incentives created by the EU. And what had been a free bonanza for EU readers – a peek into info sources from elsewhere, easier for the sites to provide than to limit in any way – has had extra friction added by the EU, to the detriment of EU subjects.
    - Xenoamorphous 5y ago
      It’s perfectly fine that if the site is small/low budget and has a small percentage of European users they don’t bother being GDPR complaint. It’s their choice. But at least they shouldn’t blatantly lie in the message they show, saying they’re working on it and how important EU visitors are.

sokoloff 5y ago

“Important to us, but not profitable to serve.”

chrisin2d 5y ago
"Important, but not important enough."
jacquesm 5y ago
No, even profitable, it's just that they can't be bothered to disable their tracking.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If it was profitable enough to bother, I’m sure they’d do it.
- short12 5y ago
  If they are an American company with no presence in EU they can blatantly ignore the privacy laws

gojomo 5y ago

I wonder if Europe will ever lift its Iron GDPR Curtain to allow its residents to access free-world websites!

jacquesm 5y ago
Note that this curtain isn't put in place by the EU, nor that compliance with the GDPR is hard.
- gojomo 5y ago
  It is an extra compliance cost & financial risk imposed by the EU, with essentially no benefit for the website. It also provides negligible benefit for any EU subject, compared to what the privacy-conscious users could achieve via self-help for themselves – by not registering, or clearing cookies, or using other tech measures. Have trillions (or quadrillions?) of EU cookie popups actually preserved any privacy at all? Or just wasted staff time, reader time, & trained a 'consent dialog blindness' into users worldwide?
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    It's a benefit to the public, the fact that companies go so far as to refuse to be compliant tells you how addicted to all this data they really are. The cookie popups were the wrong response to well intentioned legislation, the proper response would have been to stop using cookies, not to use these stupid banners. Functional cookies were never a problem, but tracking people indiscriminately is a problem. Consent dialog blindness is a good term, but it is caused by the makers of the consent dialogs not by the legislators. Not tracking is a viable alternative and does not require any dialogs.
    - gojomo 5y ago
      That US news sites find their EU visitors of such low value that they'd rather block them than spend to be compliant (& thus still get some aggregate or opt-in data) is a pretty strong refutation of the idea they're "addicted to all this data". What's the tangible harm of this supposed "indiscriminate tracking" - especially as compared to other burgeoning EU initiatives like demanding law-enforcement backdoors into e2e chat sessions? The consent-dialog-blindness is created by the regulatory demands for their constant re-display, for negligible benefit. If not even asking for cookies was 'viable', major sites – who have far better understanding of the relative tradeoffs than the regulators – would've gone that way. Can you name any that chose that 'viable' path? Are they winning their categories with that 'viability'? You know what else is 'viable'? User self help. Clearing/disabling cookies. Running a privacy-protecting browser, like say Brave. The EU could've protected a lot more privacy, without wasting the world's time & burning-out people's attention, if it had coached people into self-protection, rather than threatening businesses worldwide with fines. But hey, haughty mega-super-state's gotta do mega-super-stating.
short12 5y ago
You can just ignore it if you are not in the EU
- gojomo 5y ago
  These websites, based on their own internal analyses, have concluded ignoring it completely is not safe for them. But also, they know that implementing (& maintaining!) compliance, moreso than a simple block, has nonzero cost, while EU readers provide them negligible benefit. So they take the easy way out, given the incentives created by the EU. And what had been a free bonanza for EU readers – a peek into info sources from elsewhere, easier for the sites to provide than to limit in any way – has had extra friction added by the EU, to the detriment of EU subjects.
  - Xenoamorphous 5y ago
    It’s perfectly fine that if the site is small/low budget and has a small percentage of European users they don’t bother being GDPR complaint. It’s their choice. But at least they shouldn’t blatantly lie in the message they show, saying they’re working on it and how important EU visitors are.