Monday, May 28, 2018

Data Protection Rules Protect European reader blocking

On May 25 yesterday, the EU officially enacted GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). All companies that hold EU citizens' data are subject to such rules. In the event of leakage or misuse of data without the owner's permission, the company shall pay a penalty.

Beleid is apparently making the manager of news sites based in the United States (US) ketar-ketir. A number of news sites also chose to block European readers so they could not visit the site. US media company, Tronc, decided to block access to the population of Europe rather than dealing with the consequences of GDPR.

Understandably, in case of data leakage or misuse of user data without the permission of the owner of the data, then the company may be fined up to 20 million Euros or four percent of global revenue.

Quoted from Tech Crunch, Tronc now implies blocking European readers on the sites of the Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, The Orlando Sentinel, and The Baltimore Sun. Some media owned by Lee Enterprises also do the same blocking. The two media under Lee Enterprises that European readers can no longer access are The St. Louis Post Dispatch and The Arizona Daily Star.

When Tronc closes readers' access from Europe, at least temporarily, then a different approach is made by other US media. Instead of blocking readers from the Blue Continent, other media in the US provide different site versions for readers in Europe.

USA Today, for example, chose to be subject to GDPR rules in order not to lose millions of readers in Europe. This news site provides a special website version for European readers with a cleaner and ad-free view. In order to access it, the European population must first agree to the terms and conditions of USA Today.

"USA Today's compliance with GDPR brings up news sites that look cleaner, ad-free, without autoplay videos, and fresh design, much better than the normal version," chirps Alex Hern, technology issues writer at The Guardian, via his Twitter account .

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