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Comment by janvidar | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, I feel both valued and safe now.

The site says:

"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."

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Yeah, it's very disingenuous, what they actually should say is

"You can't use our services your government asked us to be considerate about your personal data, and you are not important enough to make that happen"

Alternatively: "there's so few of you that the cost of adding yet another set of laws to our compliance routine is greater than the revenue you'd generate".

Online publishing is low margin and this appears to be a local news station so it probably does make sense from a strict business perspective. I wouldn't be surprised if they're outsourcing compliance auditing and GDPR is a check box that cost money so they just chose to block instead. You don't need to assume questionable ethics when there's a perfectly ethical business case. Sure it would be nice if online news wasn't monetized with our data but that's not the world we live in you can't blame a local news station for not trying to be the ones to challenge the status quo.

Not exactly. It's an American company not trying to go to market in the EU; why would it invest in legal compliance with European regs? Even were the company to not store any data, there are lots of compliance steps which companies must take to _prove_ they are operating within the law. In these circumstances, it doesn't make sense to work on European compliance.

You've missed the point.

If they've no interest in going "to market" in the EU, why lie about European visitors being valued?

What you've said isn't inaccurate, it's just not relevant to the message that Europeans are shown.

To be honest, I prefer this over the non GDRP-compliant "by the way, we're tracking you, cool?" notices that most sites seem to think is okay these days. Both lead to the site being immediately closed, but at least with the former I didn't "implicitly agree" to anything.

If you still want to read, outline works fine:

https://outline.com/KA3LDn

I'm generally not a fan of the EU (or bureaucracies in general) but it seems that with regards to digital legislation and rulings they tend to at least work with good intentions (at least imo). One can argue about the implementation but I generally applaud any afford towards more privacy. They get some credit from me because I consider the lack of software patents (with minor exceptions) one of the biggest European triumphs in recent history.

I just wanted to reply "Thank you George".

Link to article on a GDPR-compliant site:

https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2019/11/08/maryland-medical-c...

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