Have any services banned Europeans in order to avoid having to comply with #GDPR?
https://betanews.com/2018/05/07/unroll-me-gdpr-europe/
@seanl Yes. Cannot find the screenshots/URLs right now, but there were some. One even offers it as their "service" for other companies.
Well there are some small online games which are shutting down in europe like Raknarok Online.
@seanl I'm not aware of any, but somebody even created a service to block European traffic https://gdpr-shield.io/ . It looks like it's down now (or blocks me). Here is the hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16991185
@seanl Mikko Hypponen has a list / thread on birdsite
@julianruf Oh wow, that's way more than I expected.
I wonder if all that's just #GDPR working as intended; i.e. it's not about privacy at all but about protecting European Internet companies from competition.
@seanl The latter can also be a byproduct of the former, which makes disentangling cause and effect more complicated.
And then there just always is a period of uncertainty and over-reactions until the dust has settled.
@julianruf @seanl
If your business model is gathering ridiculous amounts of data, unrelated to the service you are offering, on uninformed customers, it is going to be hard to comply with the new rules where you have to explicitly state (amongst other things) what you are gathering and with what purpose.
I think it is telling that in these companies privacy and security are so badly guaranteed that they prefer shutting out a entire continent instead of fixing it.
There is precedent for this, BTW: plenty of financial things ban Americans to avoid having to comply with US securities law.