Why would you region block a webpage like this
As a part-time New York City taxpayer, I'd rather we not be paying EU lawyers to make sure the MTA's open data complies with European law.
You can enforce what people and companies do within your borders. You cannot enforce what companies or people outside of your borders do.
Isn’t the GDPR’s basic theory about jurisdiction that, if I’m sitting in New York City but routinely serving my web content to people in France, that service I’m providing relies on browsing intentions and tracking functions being executed by a user and on a machine in France, and therefore the meat of the “wrongdoing” is happening within their borders?
You can choose to do that the European way or not at all. And the local contests division of the NYC local transit authority is choosing “not at all.”
Isn’t this then a case of NYC complying with the EU’s express wishes for privacy by not “exporting” code they don’t want there?
I have no problem with voluntarily complying to GDPR-style privacy regulations because it's the right thing to do. Where I am able to make the decision, we store basically no user data beyond what's required to do whatever the user is trying to do.
My problem is the EU pretending that US companies must be fully GDPR-compliant because someone in France chooses to go to their website. At the end of the day, laws are only laws because you can enforce them. If I had a magic wand and could rob a bank but the police for some reason were unable to arrest me, the fact that bank robbery is illegal is merely semantic at that point. If I chose to flaunt GDPR non-compliance on a US-based website the EU would be impotent to do anything other than block the site, which wouldn't make me any more likely to suddenly become GDPR compliant.
It's a fiction and I probably wouldn't care about it nearly as much except it has essentially ruined the public internet with cookie banners everywhere.
Every time a cookie banner gets displayed on some non-EU resident's personal blog, a puppy dies.
> 3. Eligibility: The Challenge is open to legal residents of the United States. Entrants must be 18 years of age or older as of their date of entry. The Challenge is subject to federal, state, and local laws and regulations and is void where prohibited by law. Employees and contractors of the MTA, its subsidiaries, affiliates, and directors (collectively the “Employees”), as well as members of an Employee’s immediate family and/or those living in the same household, are ineligible to participate in the Challenge.
I can access it just fine from Sweden :shrug:
I mean … as I understand the Europeans' law, only if you're doing dumb things to begin with, like giving users' data away to random 3rd parties hellbent on shoving "ads" down one's throat. If you had just made this site a simple HTML page that just had the information the MTA wanted to convey on it, AIUI the EU doesn't have a problem.
Which … the MTA does appear to be, sending requests to Google, LinkedIn, and some other CDNs.
I also don't think the MTA has any EU presence, so what are they going to do?
There is a massive difference between complying with the law and proving you comply. (Think: IRS audit.)
> don't think the MTA has any EU presence, so what are they going to do?
Send letters. The MTA would be obligated to respond to them, which means legal bills.
> The MTA would be obligated to respond to them, which means legal bills.
…why would the MTA be obligated to respond to them? They've no jurisdiction/sovereignty over an American transit agency.
Why would they audit themselves against laws that don't apply to them? (Again, jurisdiction?) I've never worked for a company that audited itself against every law from every nation on Earth; we complied with the laws where we had a presence and did business.
We're talking about a US transit agency. Even thinking about whether the EU has a problem with the agency's website is sort of absurd to begin with.
Not how jurisdiction works.
Contrary to what you seem to believe...There were more geoblocks when the EU law went into action a couple of years ago. There are less now.
Source for that?