Ask HN: Consider blocking sites that block EU citizens [GDPR]?

1 point·yummybear··2 comments

I think this is a rather different issue than the often rehashed paywall discussion.

There is no easy way around it for a large portion of us, and most likely the sites are blocking EU citizens because they are throwing around so much personal data, that they believe it would be impossible to adhere to GDPR.

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I’m so tired of this assumption that because you don’t want to deal with the costs of GDPR compliance you are obviously throwing around and selling data. I suspect this is actually a rare case and clearly you are not an engineer or work at a startup. If you did you’d understand that the potential compliance overhead is non-trivial including having a EU representative, legal review of your terms and conditions.

I don't consider censorship as a standard tenent of my developer career, and supporting such actions directly goes against my principles, this is why I wouldn't do such a thing, as I'd rather change jobs than fight that.

The sole concept of blocking part of the world from accessing your service because you don't want (or can't) let them access what you have on them, or remove said data, is pretty weird per se. Overly collecting data without consent sure is a problem, and excluding citizens under protection laws made to avoid abuse of said data can only considered as either censorship or law-bypsas.

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