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Comment by ggg9990 | Hacker News Reader

My guess: in trying to do GDPR compliance they basically did their first real code change in years. They found that everything was an undocumented web of dependencies and that even starting to understand the problem was months or years of operating profit. At that point they decided to shitcan the whole thing.

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This is an American (USA) organisation. What on earth has GDPR (an EU thing) got to do with them?

I note that the do not mention GDPR anywhere on the homepage. This reads to me like "our business model is no longer viable" or "income is less than expenditure".

* Over the last twelve months we have been carrying out a complete technical review of the infrastructure and software we use to serve Wikispaces users. As part of the review, it has become apparent that the required investment to bring the infrastructure and code in line with modern standards is very substantial.

GDPR is about users, not companies/organizations.
If I’m not mistaken, it applies to all persons in the EU (not « living there », or « citizen », literally everyone one currently « in » the EU).
So this is totally possible.

GDPR is going to be a tax on software for a good chunk of time, and probably a decent source of employment for engineers, as companies wake up and realize that they now have to deal with it. Unless there specifically are requirements to make deleting user data easy, or even possible, that's probably been punted on for years in most software products.

GDPR is going to be a tax on software for a good chunk of time
Unless you are Facebook or Google or Amazon or Microsoft (etc), most reasonably responsible companies will already be very close to GDPR compliance. The regulations really are not too onerous.
"Don't be evil" might cover it ...

From what I've seen, I wouldn't be too surprised if some practices make this hard for some companies. In particular, mixing customer data with company data and having a practice of tomb stoning rows.

Tomb stoning?

Marking a database record as "dead" to hide it from view without actually deleting the data.

Thanks for answering! Apologies if I used a term that isn't wide use, yet.

This is nonsense. Why spread this nonsense instead of doing a 30-second google search? Why is there so much pure FUD and nonsense about GDPR on HN?

https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/risk/articles/gdpr-top...
Websites offer services to all countries by default; all websites are subject to GDPR, regardless of where their owners live, unless they do something like GeoIP restrictions to exclude EU citizens.

That could mean anything from “site was written in PHP and our programmer only knows ASP.NET MVC4” through to “it is a giant mud ball and there is no documentation. We figure it would take less time to rewrite from scratch and can’t afford either project.”

GDPR applies to any company that offers a service or product, paid or free, to users within the EU. An American company with EU users must comply with the regulation.

Formally yes. If they do not have legal /business presence in EU they can not give a damn. Like with the cookies.
We live in such a distributed world that these local constraints are just wishes (and consultancy opportunities).
I am from the EU and love my privacy but I am also realistic.

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