FB, as with all third party trackers, isn't the one actually responsible for notifying you about the use of their pixels etc. on third party sites. The site operator using it is. See https://developers.facebook.com/docs/privacy
if there's a hosted image from a facebook domain (e.g. a like button), unless that image is loaded after consent is given, facebook can already associate that users' IP address with having visited that web site by nature of sending the image over. in other words, facebook is tracking pre-consent (unless those images are loaded post-hoc, which is just not happening in today's world)
as a result, it's fundamentally impossible to consent before visiting a particular website, because there's no way to know what other domains will be triggered by visiting that website.
the only way i've found to defeat this behavior is by using ublock's origin's default deny policy which prevents all 3rd party domains from being accessed by default. it's a bit of a usability pain as one often has to add e.g. stack overflow's CDN to use its website "well", but does prevent visiting a website which has an embedded image hosted on a FB domain from being loaded, which defeats the more nefarious FB tracking.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-de...
So basically prior to serving any content, you do an IP check. If they are from a GDPR country, you serve the delay loading script. If they aren't, you just load as normal. Pretty straightforward. I don't think you'd want to do it universally for all users, as you'd be at a competitive disadvantage to other sites. But you can easily enough just do it for EU countries. The other option is to just block them entirely if you have no need for EU traffic. Many sites - US local businesses etc. have no use for EU traffic or the liability that comes with it.
On a side note, with all the walled garden stuff that will be going on due to GDPR, I'll be interested to see how badly the SERPs get fractured, since every site will have a different scheme to require consent and not all of them will have people behind them that are savvy enough to make it not ask Googlebot for affirmative consent. This will put smaller businesses in the EU that don't have the resources to hire someone to deal with these issues at a serious disadvantage if they can no longer be indexed.
it could very well be that an EU citizen in Asia or the US is collected upon given your algorithm. if that's the case, are you not in violation of GDPR?
but, at the risk of rabbit-holing, your suggestion would be a pretty fundamental change to how the web works. in effect, you'd be moving toward a splintered web, where content is basically region locked.
to be fair, i don't have anything else to offer here; it just doesn't seem so easy to me.
I think you're spot on, but that was the danger of implementing heavy-handed legislation like GDPR all along. I believe that EU citizens are going to find themselves locked out of a whole world of content. But that's the world they've chosen to create for themselves. Further, if the overwhelming support that GDPR has on HN is representative of that of the entire EU population, they welcome this newly splintered world and its consequences - both good and bad (though I believe that this support is the product of the mistaken belief that the world will simply play ball and be dictated to by the EU, rather than the rest of the world simply taking their ball and going home).
It would be absolutely incredible if Facebook et al "took their ball and went home" throwing away 500 million customers.
This will make a difference for some users on some of the forums I run, as they will be banned with an apology and an invitation to come back if they ever move out of the EU. But it's not worth taking on the liability of potentially millions of dollars in fines for accidental non-compliance with a heavy handed, massively complex law that is up for different interpretations in the courts of no less than 28 unique countries. Unless you're in the EU or are a multi-billion dollar company with a large legal department, accepting EU traffic post-GDPR is an act of insanity.
No? Don't bother instituting a stupid ban like that, then. And stop scaremongering.
GDPR applies to businesses.
Besides, compliance isn't too bad for something like a forum. Just purge the relevant user records and posts, if requested to or when a user deletes their account.
Source: I am doing GDPR compliance on web applications for a major telco.
I have a business. And yes, I have spoken to GSPR compliance people, so GDPR has already cost me enough money. Compliance is a murky proposition at best, since this law can be interpreted in different ways in 28 different countries - all of whom will be looking for ways to maximize the fines they collect under it from foreign companies.
Since you are in the GDPR compliance space, surely you know that it does apply not just to businesses that are hosted in the EU or do business there. Rather, anyone that knowingly accepts traffic/data from the EU is vulnerable to it.
But in the case of the GDPR, it probably helps Google and Facebook more than it hurts them -- they can afford to jump through all of its hoops while smaller competitors might have trouble. It's essentially a barrier to entry.
And leave millions and millions in profit on the table for everyone else?
That the same argument used against changing the tax codes so companies would actually have to pay taxes in the countries in which they do business, by closing the loopholes.
They're not going to throw away profitable markets just like that. And if they do, good riddance.
You can use a combination of advertising and payment to fund services that connect people and facilitate commerce without extensive privacy destroying data collection. This model worked fine previously and it will work fine in the future. If anything hardware and tools are damn near amazing compared to the bygone past.
I struggle to think of any service in the world that is impossible or even challenging to replace. If anyone decides to take their ball and go home they will be replaced by a competitor who will use that extra revenue to improve their positions in other market to the original fools detriment.
There is in fact no reason to believe other markets including the US wont ultimately discover the merits of protecting their citizens privacy considering that in the US perhaps 171k work in the advertising industry out of 300 millions.
How the 0.02% can do an effective job without trampling the rights of the 99.98% is an exercise I leave to them and if they can't figure it out, then I hope the food stamp program still exists so they wont have to stand outside 7-11 with placards reading "will lie for food".
per GDPR, without consent, fb cannot legally use that data (for EU residents).
And you don't need to trust that; fb knows they're going to be spending some quality time in front of their privacy regulator.
Otherwise, think of the havoc. You decide that you want to get Facebook in trouble. So you place a Facebook button on your site and don't notify users or ask consent. Then you go call regulators. In this case, you'd find yourself in trouble, not Facebook.
This just leads to a bunch of questions: where an image is loaded from FB by a site, who is the data controller? Surely it's the primary site, not FB? In that case, then is FB a data processor (and subject to more restrictions)? If FB is a controller in its own right then how does FB gather consent in this case?
This is the part I'm most excited about. (Or would be if I lived in the EU.) I'll be very interested to see how that works out. I'd love to see something like that in the US.
That part of what he said is incorrect. The EU may be able to do alot of things, but they can't make me give you access to private documents on my server that is not based in the EU if I don't want to. You can simply tell them to go away if they disagree with your terms, or you can block all EU users from the beginning.
What are you going to do if the US adopts a similar law? Move all your holdings to mexico?
If the likes of Facebook and Google all turned off their services across the EU for a day, and replaced them with a SOPA-blackout-style message explaining that they can't afford to continue providing services without the ad model that pays for them, a lot of people would notice, and the EU probably wouldn't get nearly as easy a ride afterwards. I don't know how much damage would be caused if those same big tech firms cut off EU citizens permanently, but for better or worse, very many people now rely on the likes of Facebook and Google Mail for their everyday lives, and I'm betting the damage would be worse to the EU citizens than it would be to Facebook's and Google's financial statements (assuming the alternative is that they continue to operate but with a heavily damaged business model).
Yes, but that's the entire point. That's why this regulation exists That's why it has so many fans here on HN.
Not sure if there's a qualitatively different way of achieving the same goal with a different method. There probably isn't, so it boils down to a careful balancing act - how to damage those business models without going overboard and having all US companies show EU the finger.
If you're running a website with one of these, I strongly suggest you make sure you record whether people accept and actually boot them off the site of they don't. GDPR article 7 section one requires a website to be able to demonstrate that I have given consent, and recital 32 requires that that consent be specific and unambiguous. It's doubtful that "by continuing to use this site you agree..." statements will be satisfactory, especially if you start the tracking the instant they hit the page, before they can click that ok button.
I imagine that you simply won't be able to use websites anymore if you are from the EU and don't give consent. You'll just be told to go away.
I read the entire document a few weeks back and recall no such provisions. Could you cite one for me? I'm trying to be as informed on this as possible.
Article 3, "Territorial scope", lays out where GDPR applies, and it contains no derogations for "but I didn't know they were european, honest". It is not, in fact, specifically about european citizens. It covers the processing of data for "natural persons in the Union", which is a bit unclear to me but I interpret it as covering anyone physically located in a country that forms a Supervisory Authority under section 51.
How this will ultimately interact with your websites and/or businesses if you are not based in the EU is unclear at this time.
"The reach of GDPR is broad but is not unlimited. The mere fact that a U.S.-based website can be accessed in the EEA isn’t enough. If the company does not have a physical presence in the EEA, it must be determined whether that company engages in more than incidental contact with EEA residents."
So if someone is going out of their way to mask the fact that they are from the EU, and you aren't otherwise seeking out EU users, you're not going to get in trouble for that. One issue I have with it though is that translation may trigger GDPR exposure, and since Spain is part of the EU, many sites aimed at Spanish speakers (but not aimed at the EU) may have this beast of a law apply to them. I operate a few sites that have Spanish content, so that is deeply troubling.
[1] https://www.gtlaw.com/en/insights/2018/2/the-gdpr-deadline-l...
This thread is now too deep for me to respond to your comment.
"The reach of GDPR is broad but is not unlimited. The mere fact that a U.S.-based website can be accessed in the EEA isn’t enough. If the company does not have a physical presence in the EEA, it must be determined whether that company engages in more than incidental contact with EEA residents."
This statement seems to have misinterpreted article 27, which states that if your processing is merely occasional, or if you are occasionally a processor for an EU controller, you need not specify a designated representative to the EU.
Read more here: https://gdpr-info.eu/?s=occasional
But the exception you think exists pretty much doesn't. It's got a small exception for occasional sharing of data without consent when it relates to active legal proceedings.
Naturally the EU has no jurisdiction over you if you don't live in the EU and you aren't based in the EU. They may be able to apply pressure on your partners though, be that advertising companies or others. This may flow through to you, in time. We're already seeing Facebook come under pressure to provide US citizens with the same protections that the GDPR provides EU residents.
FYI you can reply to other posts when the thread is this deep by clicking on the "X minutes ago" thing on the comment your want to reply to.
Experts say a lot of things on GDPR, one of the really interesting things about reading it myself is that I've found a lot of them seem to be wrong. I've heard a few people talking about a "social media exception" that doesn't seem to exist, for example.
It's possible that there have been preliminary rulings on GDPR that I'm not aware of, because I'm not a lawyer. So I'm not by any means declaring that your experts are definitely wrong, but I am nigh on certain that their source of information for making such statements is not the GDPR text itself.
I disagree that GDPR is an overly broad law by the way. The GDPR text is actually fairly specific. It encompasses a large domain, but it clearly defines that domain (Article 9 is an example of a large but specific definition, although it is only one of multiple such articles) and tells you clearly what you need to do within that domain to be compliant.
People just /think/ it's overly broad because it impacts a lot of tech companies and none of them have actually read the text. The human brain interprets this as "inspecific", whereas it's actually carefully targeted at a handful of specific things that lots of tech companies are doing (or not doing).
It probably wasn't depth that blocked you. It was probably time. There is a short interval after a comment is posted during which the reply link is not available in the thread. (You can still reply without waiting, but you have to figure out how to get a reply button instead of a reply link. The reply button doesn't have the delay).
> This statement seems to have misinterpreted article 27
I believe that statement is summarizing recital 23, not attempting to interpret article 27.