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Comment by boznz | Hacker News Reader

This short post came about because I got an email yesterday which managed to traverse my spam filters saying my web site does not adhere to the GDPR regulations and (of course) offering to help fix it. Yes I know I shouldn't have opened it. (Lesson learnt, Spam filter added!) Anyway apologies in advance for said budget-driven, non-gdpr-compliant, web-site, and probably falling over at the slightest sign of stress.

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Just because your site uses cookies does not mean you need a consent banner to be GDPR compliant

Unless you're tracking people or sharing visitor data with third party services, you're likely not doing anything that requires consent. See here: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

That website is not authoritative and should not be given more credence than your median tech blog.

And not more credence than TFA. GDPR has legally very little to do with cookie banners as other comments have already pointed out. I am pretty sure nobody has been ever improsened because of not asking consent for storing cookies. Even for hefty fines you first need a hefty turnover, so that site seems unaffected. And obviously a couple of 100 millions are not hefty for Meta, Google & Co. They make bigger profits by taking the risks of not being in compliance.

But... your site doesn't use cookies and doesn't process personal data. Why do you think you're in breach of GDPR?

The post is supposed to be a bit tongue-in-cheek (and is tagged so), the fact being I am a New Zealand company who does have any known customers or affiliates in the EU but I also have no idea what WordPress or its plugins do in the background if you say enter your email for an RSS or comment feed.

I think lots of non-EU and non-technical bloggers would likely see the email I had (which was just opportunistic marketing spam from a European company and not nefarious) and think they were in breach of something like you say they are probably not.

>I think lots of non-EU and non-technical bloggers would likely see the email I had and think they were in breach of something like you say they are probably not.

This is true for all laws, all scams, all ads.

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