Instapaper is still not available to users in EU. It's been to months. I started to use Pocket because of this and now I don't think I'm coming back.
Don’t wait anymore. They probably not coming ever again unless GDPR is voided.
The thing is I don't want to be without such a service for a longer period of time so I'm sadly probably not coming back.
I just don't think it's particularly unjustified FUD. It is a big law that made a big splash. Can you really blame anyone who wants to wait and see how it goes down?
There IS a ton of guess work for now. To take either stance with so much certainty is a little dishonest IMHO. And I think you agree! You say yourself "... in all likelihood, on the off chance ..." Is "better safe than sorry" really so unreasonable.
Do they hate making money? Did they just want to make people panic about GDPR(after it had already been implemented)? Are their lawyers just really bad at their jobs?
Seriously. What is their motivations from your perspective?
> If what you are saying is true, why would a business choose to shut down their EU services until some later date?
> Do they hate making money? ...
> Seriously. What is their motivations from your perspective?
Don't assume businesses are making rational decisions just because they're businesses. Their motivations may very well be that their leader irrationally freaked out after reading some anti-GDPR FUD, overreacted, and hasn't yet reevaluated the decision.
1) Don’t think about users’ privacy from the start. 2) Ignore GDPR until the enforcement deadline. 3) Panic and shut down EU until you find something to do.
Are there any precedents set for GDPR enforcement yet? No? Then how can you know that?
Easy to say when you're telling someone else to take the risk.
At this point it's pretty concerning that you still have nothing to say publicly except "we're working on it", no detail, no schedule, no nothing.
Edit: To clarify I'm not saying they do that, I just can't see what part of GDPR they're having trouble with
From my point of view they store a list of URLs and provide a way to nicely view the content of those URLs. What in that could be causing 2 months of downtime to fix?
Also, giving a bit of detail or a minimal schedule is easier than a PR campaign. It’s called transparency, and it works even if you’re alone on a project.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/25/17393766/facebook-google-...
Funny thing how DailyMotion isn't getting sued, but YouTube's parent company is.
Also, nobody got sued, ignorant reporters notwithstanding. Schrems only filed complaints with the regulators.
That’s the point. When there’s no risk, nobody cares about their users’ privacy. That’s not an excuse for shutting down now that it’s legally risky to disrespect your users.
And for no good reason.
Just assume the improbable cost of some litigation as a company, like tens of thousands of others (including much bigger and much smaller than yours) did, put up a message to European customers and have them click and proceed as usual to the service.
Or, you know, use the headstart of more than a year before the law was put into practice to get the service in order...
Genuine question: as an EU citizen, without the use of a VPN or proxy is it still possible to at least log on to the service to cancel your account?
Instapaper is not a subscription-based service. The product is completely free on all platforms today.
I think the app was a one-time purchase at launch but it has been free for many years. All of the Premium features were also made free when Premium was discontinued in 2016 shortly after the Pinterest acquisition.
But this is a Free service being provided to you. Why do you believe you have the right to dictate how someone else uses their time when you're not paying for it?
(And yes, I realize the houses in this metaphor rarely have doors in their doorways, much less locks, so it's techinally not burglary, but frankly I don't care.)
The proper analogy would be: You invite a volunteer carpenter in to fix your cabinets. He asks if he can write down what cereal your family eats instead of taking payment. You say sure! (ie agree to the terms of service).
New law passes. He refuses to come back and fix your cabinets for free next time because he doesn’t want to get sued for writing down the cereal names improperly.
You then scream at him and call him names, and try to ruin his reputation on the internet and accuse him of being a thief.
Maybe if the sanctity of what cereal your family eats is so important to you, you should just directly pay money to a normal carpenter next time?
First, Instapaper is a continuous service. If you store something, you want access to it again. It's not a series of one-off, independent services.
So, no, they didn't just "refused to come back and fix your cabinets for free next time". They gave you a space to write your notes and store your links, and then they denied access to that for 2 months (and counting).
Second, you forgot the part where Instapaper had paid services for years, and that many people who are denied service today, had paid good money and stick with it. They weren't asked if they wanted it to br made free and unreliable either.
So, if Gmail was closed to the free tier European users for 2 months+, they should be OK, because "they didn't pay for it"?
>But this is a Free service being provided to you. Why do you believe you have the right to dictate how someone else uses their time when you're not paying for it?
That's an argument for the 1950s economy, this is 2018. We have other models, such as ads, user profiling, even pure eyeballs as a M&A/IPO monetisation strategies. Just because the user doesn't paid doesn't mean money aren't made from the user using the service. Except if one believe they run it from the goodness of their hearts at a loss, but then they probably also believe in the Tooth Fairy.
Not to mention that Instapaper used to actually charge too. If someone paid for the app or premium later for years, is it ok if they "make it free" and then deny access to their account for 2 months?
I thought Instapaper was a free service that Pinterest bought mainly for it's article parsing technology? As an analogy FB's customers are advertisers and media agencies who pay to keep the lights on as is Pinterest's, users are not the customers.
If I create another software product I will explicitly and permanently make it unavailable to EU residents.
That’s more than enough time.
While I'm a bit annoyed at the amount of paperwork and side systems that need to be constructed to ensure proper handling of personal data that I have had to implement, I can only see GDPR as something positive for the people.
My apps are tiny, free, and just not worth the hassle of figuring out what GDPR compliance is (even though they are likely GDPR compliant already since I don't store any info).
I think we're going to see a lot of small indie developers just not publish to the EU until it makes financial sense (which might be never). And that's exactly what happened here: Instapaper is a two-person team and they didn't have the time or resources to ensure compliance, so they just kept letting it slide.
I suspect we'll see much more of this to come for the EU.
Yes, GDPR may be beneficial and all, but thinking that it does not have an associated cost of a higher barrier to entry is a bit myopic.
And if your application doesn't store data, then it's a one time cost essentially. Which is the time spent reading up on the legislation.
How do I naturally during development acquire an Article 27 representative?
"Due to the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we're currently unable to offer products and services to customers in the European Economic Community. We apologize for the inconvenience."
People have to be able to make informed decisions. It’s hard to tell from the outside if a restaurant is safe, so we have inspections. It’s impossible to tell if a website is trustworthy with your personal data, so we have laws to try and ensure they will be.
You really don’t understand this?
What I do give a damn about is not being able to read some quality publications that rationally decided GDPR is not worth the risk.
Not a week passes without such a reminder that I’m now living behind the Great EU Firewall. I now live in a place where I need to use a VPN to access all of the Internet, for crying out loud.
And that’s not to mention the click through acceptances of terms an every fucking site, that’s “only” annoying as hell (which nobody reads anymore and thus GDPR changed exactly nothing in it’s supposed goal).
EU’s bureaucratic zeal made, via GDPR, my life worse, with no benefit, even theoretical, for me. So please spare us the lecture on how GDPR is good for us. It’s terrible even for consumers.
If you don't respect your users' privacy you don't deserve to do business in the EU. And make no mistake: whether you like it or not, that legislation - or something very like it - is going to jump the Atlantic sooner or later, so why not position yourself ahead of the curve instead of stropping off and taking your ball home?
There are side-effects I don't like about GDPR, like the endless bombardment of overwrought cookie consents on every site I visit (definitely something that degrades the experience of the web), but I do like the fact that my privacy has to be respected by corporations.
GDPR is becoming that on steroids: the only thing that changed was for the worse: some sites outright banned EU visitors, the rest started using obnoxious terms screens that are even worse than cookie bars. Nothing really changed.
Anybody with half a brain could have seen this coming. But no, let’s double down on the same thing with GDPR. This time it will surely go down differently...
It doesn't have anything to do with GDPR, but it's a fantastic example of (likely) well-intended European privacy regulation both is utterly useless and also stands zero chance of jumping the Atlantic.
So you're going to make the decision of what constitutes "respecting my privacy" for every single person in the EU?
This is equivocating.
The issue is not whether you agree with having your privacy protected. The issue is deciding what constitutes "respecting privacy" for every single person in the EU, and threatening people with violence if they disagree.