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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

No one is going to go around complying with random rules from other countries, man. If you don't serve that population, just opt them out.

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> random rules from other countries

Ever thought that complying with those "random" personal data protection laws shows a respect for users decency and privacy in your own country, as well as those users in the UK/EU?

They complied by building a blocking system, instead of just disabling cookies with a flag, which would have taken exactly the same effort.

This would be true if they were working from a baremetal Apache server. But they seem to be using a vendor, Cloudflare, for their CDN. And so I strongly suspect that they used their existing Cloudflare account to do it. Just type the countries you want to block into a field in the Cloudflare UI and you're done. I've used that UI myself (not for GPDR reasons but for compliance with my countries sanctions). Significantly easier than controlling the cookies and data retention and getting an audit to certify compliance, which I've also done.

You don't need to get an Audit for Compliance with GDPR.

Whoever told you that was scamming you

When you don't know what you're talking about, an option you always have is to be silent. I suggest that you exercise that option next time.

At the time I was doing this, it was part of a very large company that quarterly ran audits of all their own systems for security and legal compliance, and they did GPDR as one of their things to audit against.

So we were not scammed, we had our internal employees do their job.

It was their own choice then.

GDPR doesn't require you to perform audits, unlike other Regulations or certifications

And by "no one" you mean almost everyone.

Except that it’s an entire continent and loads of people do comply with it. You just sound ignorant.

I've been in meetings where this was discussed.

"It's just a checkbox in cloudflare to not show up there" is so effortless that you need a compelling reason to ignore how easy it is.

And if you don't already have traffic analysis showing that 30% of your readers and thus 30% of your ad revenue is coming from the European continent... You spend the 45 seconds it takes to find the check box and you click. Then worrying about maybe possibly getting screwed by some far away legal something or other is irrelevant.

So we're supposed to deal with your bullshit Patriot Act while GDPR is too "random" for you?

The GDPR is an overreach as evidenced by the OP kvetching about why a foreign country does not comply with his country’s regulations regarding cookie use.

What’s the corollary for the patriot act? AFAIK, its provisions would only affect immigration and travel, which happen inside a country’s borders.

(nice username)

Patriot Act, FISA, Cloud Act allows the USA to basically impose its justice over other countries. And it's never in the interest of its citizens.

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