GDPR is the European Union's drastic change to privacy laws. It doesn't just involve telling people that cookies are being used on websites. You also need to opt-in for targetted ads, opt-in for mailing lists, the website has to allow you to see the data they collect (which is hard because most don't keep personalised data and now need to create new databases to store it), and when requested to delete stuff you need to delete it from every backup you have ever made as well. The penalty for not doing this is 4% of your global revenue.
Unsurprisingly some organisations in the USA are just blocking European users. The Tron group which owns news sites like the LA Times and Chicago Tribune, as obviously calculated that they don't make much money from the European visitors they do get, so it's cheaper to just block Europe than spend money complying with GDPR.
Some online games have shut off their European servers for the same reason.
And the latest thing to go wrong is people with smart homes that use Wi-fi to control their alarm systems, their central heating, their lights (and hence are sending data back and forth between the devices). Some manufacturers are simply switching off the Wi-Fi aspect:
One Chinese smart device manufacturer, Yeelight, sent a message to users that its light bulbs no longer functioned properly as a result of GDPR compliance.
"According to GDPR, we will not be able to continue to provide this service to you," the message stated.
Individual light bulbs were still functional if they were switched on one at a time, but no other features.
I expect the owners of these bulbs are fuming - if they wanted something that had to be manually switched on they would have bought cheaper ordinary bulbs.
A lot of these manufacturers will simply decline to sell their stuff in Europe in future to get around GDPR. That means Europe is going to become isolated from large chunks of technology and from goods and services. Of course these goods could be made in Europe at great cost - and the customer will then pay through the nose for things the rest of the world are getting cheap.
Hi your article is very good.
i want to translate it and share your idea with people around me.
am from China, Beijing.
hope can get your early response discuss about this.
Thank you so much for your sharing.
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