The EU’s new privacy law went into effect overnight. Bloomberg tells us how it is going
Since this web site’s inception in 2004, visitors from Europe and Asia have been blocked by IP address ranges. The only authorized users of this free service are legal citizens of North America accessing the service from within North America.
If you are a citizen of an EU country and intend to enforce rights under EU GDPR law, you must cease using this web site immediately. Attempts to evade our ban on EU visitors by using TOR or proxy servers will be considered an attempt to gain unauthorized access to a computer system, which might result in legal consequences under United States law.
The EU has already filed lawsuits against companies that gave Europeans the option of consenting to how they use the data or no longer using their website… coercion, they say… not what they are doing to the website owners, but what the websites are doing to comply with the new EU law. 😉 The SRG notice threads the needle and avoids that problem. Well done.
The whole basis of passing laws not based on where the website really is, but how the user’s get their IP address is fundamentally flawed and a scheme to limit competition and thwart access and institute government control of companies that are outside the borders of the governments trying to regulate them. What if my condo association passes its own privacy rights for websites in California? What if Mexico does? It is all a scheme by lawyers to make us pay more money to lawyers.
When the EU demanded that Microsoft turn over the source code to Windows, they should have declared that Microsoft would no longer sell or support Microsoft products in Europe and disabled access to all products not under a paid service contract. It was truly bizarre that Microsoft was fined for giving away a product for free. But they were cowards, so here we are. Hopefully, this will trigger the end of the EU
In all fairness to the EU, they were just following the Clinton administration’s lead in suing Microsoft for being a monopoly on Windows computers. The EU wanted to milk that same cash cow that Clinton did.
The sad truth is that they destroyed Microsoft and made it impossible to innovate. Any significant new feature or product had to be justified by lawyers in court, so the new features and products came to a standstill.
At that time, Apple also had a monopoly on Apple computers, but they had no money to milk.
The most “over the line” aspect is that GDPR considers the IP address of a visitor to be “protected personal information” requiring consent if the data is stored. At the same time, governments require some entities to retain IP information for future criminal investigations. Who is John Galt?
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