Utopia Talk - Politics - Stop blocking me, please

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Utopia Talk / Politics / Stop blocking me, please

Daemon
Member Wed Aug 08 04:28:50
http://www...months-after-gdpr-took-effect/

More than 1,000 U.S. news sites are still unavailable in Europe, two months after GDPR took effect

Websites had two years to get ready for the GDPR. But rather than comply, about a third of the 100 largest U.S. newspapers have instead chosen to block European visitors to their sites.

By Jeff South Aug. 7, 2018

As a senior editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daniel Rubin writes a daily newsletter with links to 10 “Hey, Martha!” articles — some on Philly.com, some on other news websites. The newsletter is a labor of love, Rubin said, and he kept it going even during a recent vacation to Ireland.

Scouring the web for newsletter fodder from a hunting lodge in Connemara, Rubin clicked through the privacy consent forms that the European Union now requires online publishers to present to visitors. No problem — until he read that Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer-winning restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, had died.

“I went to the paper’s site to gather some of his articles and reviews and the paper’s obit, but they blocked me from even their homepage,” Rubin recalled.

That’s because latimes.com has not complied with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect May 25. Instead, people accessing the site from Europe are routed to this notice.

More than two months after the GDPR took effect, hundreds of U.S. news websites — including digital properties operated by Tronc, Lee Enterprises and GateHouse Media — are unavailable in Europe, frustrating many American tourists, business travelers, and ex-pats as well as Europeans interested in news from the States.

“Usually, your media is seen as an example for ours. I think is safe to say that, in Portugal, there’s a big community of people that not only reads the Portuguese media but reads the U.S. press as well on a daily basis,” said Flávio Nunes, a journalist in Lisbon.

He was ticked when he tried to follow a tweet to a Los Angeles Times story on July 22. Nunes knew Tronc had missed the deadline to comply with the GDPR, but he figured that was a temporary oversight.

“I was surprised when I saw that, a couple of months after, they’re still blocking our access,” Nunes said. “It’s crazy because Europe is a massive market. We have over 500 million people living in the EU.”

James Longhurst, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, subscribes to his hometown newspaper, the La Crosse Tribune. While in Germany for an academic conference this summer, he was stymied in accessing the paper online.

“I found it very strange that the Tribune had essentially changed the global internet into an intranet, only available for local use,” Longhurst said. “It’s just amazingly parochial — a pretense that the rest of the world doesn’t exist and that people in the rest of the world wouldn’t have any access or interest in local news.”

Since May 25, scores of social media postings have complained that certain U.S. news sites were unavailable in Europe. Some blamed the EU.

Mark A.M. Kramer, a Baltimore native studying at the University of Salzburg, has a subscription to the Los Angeles Times but can’t access the paper’s website from Austria.

“I have lived two decades in Europe in various locations and have always kept in touch with local U.S. news through online subscriptions,” Kramer said. His advice to blocked news sites: “Think global, cover local. You are missing a great opportunity to engage a readership which goes beyond your perceived demographic.”

The GDPR requires websites to obtain consent from users before collecting personal information, explain what data are being collected and why, and delete a user’s information if requested. Violating the GDPR can draw a hefty fine — as much as 4 percent of a company’s annual revenue.

Websites had two years to get ready for the GDPR. Rather than comply, about a third of the 100 largest U.S. newspapers have opted to block their sites in Europe. They include the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Dallas Morning News, Newsday and The Virginian-Pilot.

Joseph O’Connor, a self-described “rogue archivist” in the United Kingdom, has been tracking the issue. He started after a gunman killed five staff members of the Capital Gazette on June 28. O’Connor wanted to read about the shooting, but the paper in Annapolis, Maryland, and the nearby Baltimore Sun, both Tronc properties, are blocked in Europe.

As of Monday, O’Connor found that more than 1,000 news sites were unavailable in the EU. They included more than 40 broadcast websites and about 100 sites operated under GateHouse’s Wicked Local brand.

GateHouse and Tronc did not respond to requests for comment about the GDPR. Lee Enterprises has no plans to comply. Company spokesperson Charles Arms said Lee’s websites wouldn’t draw enough visitors from the more than 30 countries in the EU and the European Economic Area to justify compliance.

“Internet traffic on our local news sites originating from the EU and EEA is de minimis, and we believe blocking that traffic is in the best interest of our local media clients,” Arms said.

From a financial standpoint, that position is justified, according to Alan Mutter, who teaches media economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He said international web traffic might benefit The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post but “ads served in Paris, Palermo, or Potsdam don’t help advertisers in Peoria.”

But being available in Europe can help customer relations. And about 16 million Americans visited Europe last year.

People in Europe who have encountered a blocked news site can circumvent the problem by using a virtual private network. Maggie Magliato, a recent college graduate from Northern Virginia working as an au pair in Spain, found a workaround when she was unable to access the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star online: A friend made a PDF of an article and emailed it to her.

But the ultimate solution is to comply with the GDPR, said Craig Vodnik, a Chicago-based business consultant with an office in Europe.

Vodnik was in Cologne, Germany, on July 5 trying to read the news back home. He was shocked to find that the websites of the Chicago Tribune and affiliated WGN-TV were blocked: “Do they really not care about international travelers?”

Sarah Toporoff, a Massachusetts native who works in Paris for the Global Editors Network, which promotes newsroom innovation, raised similar questions. She said U.S. newsrooms “are a benchmark for digital innovation” — and it’s important that their content be available in Europe.

“It is naive and wholly irresponsible to think that U.S. news holds no relevance beyond U.S. borders,” Toporoff said. “U.S. brands should be better at knowledge sharing with their European counterparts and learn how to serve audiences within the GDPR’s parameters. Not to do so is quite undemocratic.”

Seb
Member Wed Aug 08 05:40:57
Thing is, GDPR compliance is actually pretty trivial if you are not doing horrifically terrible things to begin with.

So this looks a tad daft, or alternatively these guys are doing pretty bad things with your data.

Aeros
Member Wed Aug 08 06:13:34
Yeah, but nobody in North America likes the Eurocrats and their regulations. Sticking it to them on general principle is the order of the day, since the general assumption here is if we give Brussels an inch they will demand a mile. The US has it's own regulatory framework. If that is insufficient for the EU they can go fuck right the fuck off.

Seb
Member Wed Aug 08 08:56:07
Aeros:

Are you aware of quite how much financial regulatory crap Europe has to put up with thanks to SEC?

But fine, stick it to the man by er... allowing companies to completely violate your privacy and handle you personal data without basic security. Show us whose boss.

In the long run though, places with the better regulation tend to become the preference for location of business in order to signal they are not fucking over the customer.

California is looking at adopting a cloned version of GDPR btw.

Seb
Member Wed Aug 08 09:02:29
Thing is, from a legal perspective, the blocking is kind of irrelevant.

The law still applies, in so far as there are mechanisms to enforce it and hold the provider to account, they would still apply whether or not they put an IP block in place.

hood
Member Wed Aug 08 09:15:43
"The law still applies, in so far as there are mechanisms to enforce it and hold the provider to account, they would still apply whether or not they put an IP block in place."

Completely meaningless. If the IP is blocked, the websites aren't gathering any data to invoke gdpr or EU regulation. That's the point of the geoblock. "Conformance" by abstinence.

kargen
Member Wed Aug 08 11:23:34
The quick and smart fix is to exempt companies not actually located in the EU. The user would get a warning that the site is exempt and they continue at their own risk.
The part I really don't like about the GDPR is the right to be forgotten crap. If you post a stupid photo of yourself or type something stupid it shouldn't be the companies responsibility to remove it five years later because you are all of a sudden embarrassed by it. Have some personal responsibility.

Companies should tell you how your information might be used up front but the government shouldn't be able to dictate to a company how that information is used nor even stored.

The part that makes sense is requiring companies to let consumers know when data has been compromised and to do it in a timely manner. Other than that let the companies make their own guidelines for how collected data is handled so long as they are up front about it.

hood
Member Wed Aug 08 11:31:43
What right does a company have to use my data? I did not give them permission, they simply took it and began using it.

If companies want to collect my data, I want $$$ for their appropriation. And yes, I set my browser to automatically make a "do not track" request that websites just categorically ignore.

Sam Adams
Member Wed Aug 08 12:13:50
"What right does a company have to use my data? "

You went to their website.

hood
Member Wed Aug 08 12:27:22
So by driving on public roads, police have the right to track your every move?

Or, wait!
http://www...t-ruling-cell-phone/index.html

It's already illegal for the police to track cell phone metadata without a warrant. Yet you're suggesting that simply by visiting a website (using a road), the website operator (police) can grab as much as they want (track car/phone metadata) without permission?

Yeah, no.

kargen
Member Wed Aug 08 15:08:32
Public roads are just that...public. So doesn't apply at all. That aside cities all over the place use traffic cameras to give people who run red lights tickets.

Police do not own the company nor your cell phone that might have data on it you want. You didn't go into an agreement with the police department when you bought your phone. You did however enter a users agreement with the company that provides you cell coverage.

When you sign up to read an online paper you will see a user agreement and you will have to agree to it to continue on their site. You give your permission by doing so.

Again the most stupid part of this whole thing is requiring companies to somehow be able to track and remove some dumb assed post you made five years ago. You send a letter to the editor saying we should be feeding unwanted puppies and kittens to the homeless in shelters that is something you should live with. You shouldn't be able to decide hey I don't want people to see that and then force the company to use their resources to be sure it is never seen again.

hood
Member Wed Aug 08 15:30:55
"When you sign up to read an online paper you will see a user agreement and you will have to agree to it to continue on their site. You give your permission by doing so."

And when I don't sign up? When all I do is go to a website, reject cookies, and look at the page for a few minutes? Somehow I'm still tracked, despite clearly indicating that I do not consent.

What about when all I'm doing is purchasing a product? It's a pretty straightforward exchange. Here is money, give me that item. Suddenly, wanting to buy an item now also grants blanket rights for the seller to go wild with any data they can grab from me? This is yet again bullshit.

"That aside cities all over the place use traffic cameras to give people who run red lights tickets."

That is one camera. They're a bunch of one cameras. There is no network of cameras watching you drive, making notes of your destinations and routes (or rather, there shouldn't be, legally. I'm sure the NSA has their databases). Methinks you don't understand just how wide internet tracking goes.

Seb
Member Wed Aug 08 15:43:51
Hood:

What I'm saying is that legally that still doesn't necessarily work. If a European say, access the services via a vpn, the way the law is constructed doesn't clearly exempt the company from all GDPR obligations as the rights apply to the European individual as the data relates to him, irrespective of how it got there.

e.g. right to be forgotten: it doesn't matter that the data is hosted overseas, it's data about the EU citizen who can enforce that through EU courts and insofar as the co in question can be targeted by enforcement measures, they'd still have problems.

Geoblocking doesn't work as a legal solution for the things most relevant to media cos. But it does potentially limit ypur overall risk/cost as with fewer European users there's less of them to sue you.

Kargen:

It's a feature not a bug.

show deleted posts

Daemon Member	Wed Aug 08 04:28:50 http://www...months-after-gdpr-took-effect/ More than 1,000 U.S. news sites are still unavailable in Europe, two months after GDPR took effect Websites had two years to get ready for the GDPR. But rather than comply, about a third of the 100 largest U.S. newspapers have instead chosen to block European visitors to their sites. By Jeff South Aug. 7, 2018 As a senior editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daniel Rubin writes a daily newsletter with links to 10 “Hey, Martha!” articles — some on Philly.com, some on other news websites. The newsletter is a labor of love, Rubin said, and he kept it going even during a recent vacation to Ireland. Scouring the web for newsletter fodder from a hunting lodge in Connemara, Rubin clicked through the privacy consent forms that the European Union now requires online publishers to present to visitors. No problem — until he read that Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer-winning restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, had died. “I went to the paper’s site to gather some of his articles and reviews and the paper’s obit, but they blocked me from even their homepage,” Rubin recalled. That’s because latimes.com has not complied with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect May 25. Instead, people accessing the site from Europe are routed to this notice. More than two months after the GDPR took effect, hundreds of U.S. news websites — including digital properties operated by Tronc, Lee Enterprises and GateHouse Media — are unavailable in Europe, frustrating many American tourists, business travelers, and ex-pats as well as Europeans interested in news from the States. “Usually, your media is seen as an example for ours. I think is safe to say that, in Portugal, there’s a big community of people that not only reads the Portuguese media but reads the U.S. press as well on a daily basis,” said Flávio Nunes, a journalist in Lisbon. He was ticked when he tried to follow a tweet to a Los Angeles Times story on July 22. Nunes knew Tronc had missed the deadline to comply with the GDPR, but he figured that was a temporary oversight. “I was surprised when I saw that, a couple of months after, they’re still blocking our access,” Nunes said. “It’s crazy because Europe is a massive market. We have over 500 million people living in the EU.” James Longhurst, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, subscribes to his hometown newspaper, the La Crosse Tribune. While in Germany for an academic conference this summer, he was stymied in accessing the paper online. “I found it very strange that the Tribune had essentially changed the global internet into an intranet, only available for local use,” Longhurst said. “It’s just amazingly parochial — a pretense that the rest of the world doesn’t exist and that people in the rest of the world wouldn’t have any access or interest in local news.” Since May 25, scores of social media postings have complained that certain U.S. news sites were unavailable in Europe. Some blamed the EU. Mark A.M. Kramer, a Baltimore native studying at the University of Salzburg, has a subscription to the Los Angeles Times but can’t access the paper’s website from Austria. “I have lived two decades in Europe in various locations and have always kept in touch with local U.S. news through online subscriptions,” Kramer said. His advice to blocked news sites: “Think global, cover local. You are missing a great opportunity to engage a readership which goes beyond your perceived demographic.” The GDPR requires websites to obtain consent from users before collecting personal information, explain what data are being collected and why, and delete a user’s information if requested. Violating the GDPR can draw a hefty fine — as much as 4 percent of a company’s annual revenue. Websites had two years to get ready for the GDPR. Rather than comply, about a third of the 100 largest U.S. newspapers have opted to block their sites in Europe. They include the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Dallas Morning News, Newsday and The Virginian-Pilot. Joseph O’Connor, a self-described “rogue archivist” in the United Kingdom, has been tracking the issue. He started after a gunman killed five staff members of the Capital Gazette on June 28. O’Connor wanted to read about the shooting, but the paper in Annapolis, Maryland, and the nearby Baltimore Sun, both Tronc properties, are blocked in Europe. As of Monday, O’Connor found that more than 1,000 news sites were unavailable in the EU. They included more than 40 broadcast websites and about 100 sites operated under GateHouse’s Wicked Local brand. GateHouse and Tronc did not respond to requests for comment about the GDPR. Lee Enterprises has no plans to comply. Company spokesperson Charles Arms said Lee’s websites wouldn’t draw enough visitors from the more than 30 countries in the EU and the European Economic Area to justify compliance. “Internet traffic on our local news sites originating from the EU and EEA is de minimis, and we believe blocking that traffic is in the best interest of our local media clients,” Arms said. From a financial standpoint, that position is justified, according to Alan Mutter, who teaches media economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He said international web traffic might benefit The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post but “ads served in Paris, Palermo, or Potsdam don’t help advertisers in Peoria.” But being available in Europe can help customer relations. And about 16 million Americans visited Europe last year. People in Europe who have encountered a blocked news site can circumvent the problem by using a virtual private network. Maggie Magliato, a recent college graduate from Northern Virginia working as an au pair in Spain, found a workaround when she was unable to access the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star online: A friend made a PDF of an article and emailed it to her. But the ultimate solution is to comply with the GDPR, said Craig Vodnik, a Chicago-based business consultant with an office in Europe. Vodnik was in Cologne, Germany, on July 5 trying to read the news back home. He was shocked to find that the websites of the Chicago Tribune and affiliated WGN-TV were blocked: “Do they really not care about international travelers?” Sarah Toporoff, a Massachusetts native who works in Paris for the Global Editors Network, which promotes newsroom innovation, raised similar questions. She said U.S. newsrooms “are a benchmark for digital innovation” — and it’s important that their content be available in Europe. “It is naive and wholly irresponsible to think that U.S. news holds no relevance beyond U.S. borders,” Toporoff said. “U.S. brands should be better at knowledge sharing with their European counterparts and learn how to serve audiences within the GDPR’s parameters. Not to do so is quite undemocratic.”
Seb Member	Wed Aug 08 05:40:57 Thing is, GDPR compliance is actually pretty trivial if you are not doing horrifically terrible things to begin with. So this looks a tad daft, or alternatively these guys are doing pretty bad things with your data.
Aeros Member	Wed Aug 08 06:13:34 Yeah, but nobody in North America likes the Eurocrats and their regulations. Sticking it to them on general principle is the order of the day, since the general assumption here is if we give Brussels an inch they will demand a mile. The US has it's own regulatory framework. If that is insufficient for the EU they can go fuck right the fuck off.
Seb Member	Wed Aug 08 08:56:07 Aeros: Are you aware of quite how much financial regulatory crap Europe has to put up with thanks to SEC? But fine, stick it to the man by er... allowing companies to completely violate your privacy and handle you personal data without basic security. Show us whose boss. In the long run though, places with the better regulation tend to become the preference for location of business in order to signal they are not fucking over the customer. California is looking at adopting a cloned version of GDPR btw.
Seb Member	Wed Aug 08 09:02:29 Thing is, from a legal perspective, the blocking is kind of irrelevant. The law still applies, in so far as there are mechanisms to enforce it and hold the provider to account, they would still apply whether or not they put an IP block in place.
hood Member	Wed Aug 08 09:15:43 "The law still applies, in so far as there are mechanisms to enforce it and hold the provider to account, they would still apply whether or not they put an IP block in place." Completely meaningless. If the IP is blocked, the websites aren't gathering any data to invoke gdpr or EU regulation. That's the point of the geoblock. "Conformance" by abstinence.
kargen Member	Wed Aug 08 11:23:34 The quick and smart fix is to exempt companies not actually located in the EU. The user would get a warning that the site is exempt and they continue at their own risk. The part I really don't like about the GDPR is the right to be forgotten crap. If you post a stupid photo of yourself or type something stupid it shouldn't be the companies responsibility to remove it five years later because you are all of a sudden embarrassed by it. Have some personal responsibility. Companies should tell you how your information might be used up front but the government shouldn't be able to dictate to a company how that information is used nor even stored. The part that makes sense is requiring companies to let consumers know when data has been compromised and to do it in a timely manner. Other than that let the companies make their own guidelines for how collected data is handled so long as they are up front about it.
hood Member	Wed Aug 08 11:31:43 What right does a company have to use my data? I did not give them permission, they simply took it and began using it. If companies want to collect my data, I want $$$ for their appropriation. And yes, I set my browser to automatically make a "do not track" request that websites just categorically ignore.
Sam Adams Member	Wed Aug 08 12:13:50 "What right does a company have to use my data? " You went to their website.
hood Member	Wed Aug 08 12:27:22 So by driving on public roads, police have the right to track your every move? Or, wait! http://www...t-ruling-cell-phone/index.html It's already illegal for the police to track cell phone metadata without a warrant. Yet you're suggesting that simply by visiting a website (using a road), the website operator (police) can grab as much as they want (track car/phone metadata) without permission? Yeah, no.
kargen Member	Wed Aug 08 15:08:32 Public roads are just that...public. So doesn't apply at all. That aside cities all over the place use traffic cameras to give people who run red lights tickets. Police do not own the company nor your cell phone that might have data on it you want. You didn't go into an agreement with the police department when you bought your phone. You did however enter a users agreement with the company that provides you cell coverage. When you sign up to read an online paper you will see a user agreement and you will have to agree to it to continue on their site. You give your permission by doing so. Again the most stupid part of this whole thing is requiring companies to somehow be able to track and remove some dumb assed post you made five years ago. You send a letter to the editor saying we should be feeding unwanted puppies and kittens to the homeless in shelters that is something you should live with. You shouldn't be able to decide hey I don't want people to see that and then force the company to use their resources to be sure it is never seen again.
hood Member	Wed Aug 08 15:30:55 "When you sign up to read an online paper you will see a user agreement and you will have to agree to it to continue on their site. You give your permission by doing so." And when I don't sign up? When all I do is go to a website, reject cookies, and look at the page for a few minutes? Somehow I'm still tracked, despite clearly indicating that I do not consent. What about when all I'm doing is purchasing a product? It's a pretty straightforward exchange. Here is money, give me that item. Suddenly, wanting to buy an item now also grants blanket rights for the seller to go wild with any data they can grab from me? This is yet again bullshit. "That aside cities all over the place use traffic cameras to give people who run red lights tickets." That is one camera. They're a bunch of one cameras. There is no network of cameras watching you drive, making notes of your destinations and routes (or rather, there shouldn't be, legally. I'm sure the NSA has their databases). Methinks you don't understand just how wide internet tracking goes.
Seb Member	Wed Aug 08 15:43:51 Hood: What I'm saying is that legally that still doesn't necessarily work. If a European say, access the services via a vpn, the way the law is constructed doesn't clearly exempt the company from all GDPR obligations as the rights apply to the European individual as the data relates to him, irrespective of how it got there. e.g. right to be forgotten: it doesn't matter that the data is hosted overseas, it's data about the EU citizen who can enforce that through EU courts and insofar as the co in question can be targeted by enforcement measures, they'd still have problems. Geoblocking doesn't work as a legal solution for the things most relevant to media cos. But it does potentially limit ypur overall risk/cost as with fewer European users there's less of them to sue you. Kargen: It's a feature not a bug.
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