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Comment by lcfg | Hacker News Reader

GDPR hysteria.

I could buy "hysteria" as an explanation for the little startup apps or blogs that have shown up on HN these last few days, but these papers have revenues in excess of $2 billion. I have to assume there was some due diligence involved.

In general, the online site of a newspaper doubtless does a lot of ad tracking. To the degree that readership is mostly local (as it is for most newspapers with relatively few exceptions), geofencing seems like a pretty rational response to potential compliance headaches. More trouble than it's worth is a wholly rational business justification for a case where a geo is currently unimportant and there's no business plan to expand there in the future.

What’s their profit?

I wished everyone who says "GDPR hysteria" would cover legal costs for those who are hysteric.

For a site that shows text and images you have a simple solution change the code

if(isUserInEU())

showBlobkingPopup();)

else

loadAllTrackingScripts();

into

if(isUserInEU())

loadNonTrackingScripts();

else

loadAllTrackingScripts();

The problem is ads. Many networks track their users, and the site is responsible for that too. Eliminating all ads means the EU users become only a cost.

They need to integrate GDPR-compliant ad networks to serve to EU users, and they probably didn't do the work.

There is no need to eliminate all ads. You need consent for the apps though.

"GDPR is very pragmatic on this point: whatever is really necessary for an app is legal without consent, the rest needs a free 'yes' or 'no' option."

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44252327

Exactly, and until they find some EU advertisers they can put some static ads.

Ads!= tracking Also Ads!= only viable source of income.

Why not directly?

    solveAllGDPRIssues();

If you have a webpage with text and iamges, no user accounts and subscriptions then why you prefer to block the users then load the page without tracking, and show some static ads,better then nothing.

Showing a popup with things like -we have Google analytics that track you in this way -we have FB scripts that do this -we have ad company X script that tracks this -we have Y product that tracks your focus .... would also be good,then I know what "I lost" not getting access to that page

No, it's not better than nothing. In fact, it's worse than nothing. Which is why they're not doing that.

It's extremely difficult for classic news media to make money in the internet-world. They're not tracking you because they hate privacy, they're tracking you because they need to show you ads to earn a few cents to pay for their newsroom.

> They're not tracking you because they hate privacy

They're tracking you because they're indifferent to your privacy, and they can make money by violating it.

The writing has been on the walls for a while ever since ad blockers took off.

Media companies that are still trying to make money by selling their users are deprecated.

Many people are using ad blockers and this number is increasing, the tracking business model is doomed with or without GDPR.

Are we sure that targeted ads are better then topic ads or is this a myth created by some big companies.

No. They are tracking you because they are entirely oblivious to privacy and to the stuff they run on their websites.

A lot of those links and trackers and what-nots come from affiliate networks, or because some marketing manager said it would be better that way. And now they are suddenly alerted to the fact that they run 30+ trackers on their sites, and believe you me they have very vague idea about what those trackers are doing.

That’s just a helper function for:

    process.exit(1);

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