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Email Unsubscription Service Unroll.me To Close To EU Users Saying it Can't Comply With GDPR (techcrunch.com)
Unroll.me, a company that has, for years, used the premise useful "email unsubscription" service to gain access to people's email inboxes in order to data-mine the contents for competitive intelligence -- and controversially flog the gleaned commercial insights to the likes of Uber -- is to stop serving users in Europe ahead of a new data protection enforcement regime incoming under GDPR, which applies from May 25. From a report: In a section on its website about the regional service shutdown, the company writes that "unfortunately we can no longer support users from the EU as of the 23rd of May," before asking whether a visitor lives in the EU or not. Clicking 'no' doesn't seem to do anything but clicking 'yes' brings up another info screen where Unroll.me writes that this is its "last month in the EU" -- because it says it will be unable to comply with "all GDPR requirements" (although it does not specify which portions of the regulation it cannot comply with).
I tried it, and all I got were a few links to external pages. Nothing worked out of the box.
One useless parasite down. That's a start.
Go, GDPR!
No sig today...
How can anyone be surprised that a company with full access to someone's email misuses the information they receive.
Why is anyone still using the service after they got caught lying?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Pretending to be a service for unsubscibing, while actually being a data-mining company...
You do realize that false advertising has always been illegal in the EU? Perhaps the real problem is that the fines for false advertising is too low, and the GDPR fines are large enough that companies care about them.
Jobs will be lost.
News at 11.
access to people's email inboxes in order to data-mine the contents for competitive intelligence -- and controversially flog the gleaned commercial insights to the likes of Uber
It's almost as if that's exactly the sort of undisclosed behavior the GDPR is designed to combat...
Granted, I suppose my subject is a bit unfair. If violating privacy is your primary business model, I guess "can't" is technically accurate.
Why does it matter which part of the GDPR a company is unable to comply with? Despite how scummy of a company they are, unrollme will not be able to provide services to a large portion of the world. Privacy advocates want it (including myself), and we got it. We don't get to jab our fingers in the wound and blame the company as a way to avoid any potential negative feelings about what has happened.
To reiterate: GDPR good. Unrollme bad. *massages temples* I chose this life. I chose this life.
OMG facts!
Mandating personal privacy has cost you free shitty email service.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
GDPR is like a great filter which tells me who is breaking my privacy and who won't. Say you close off to EU customer because of GDPR ? Great I know you were breaking my privacy and selling my data ! Good riddance !
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
If they can't justify processing my data under any of the numerous and rather broad bases, then they don't deserve to get them.
Unable or unwilling? I think we all know the answer to that.
Another company to add to my blacklist.
Or is everyone on this discussion some kind of EU proponent wanting less freedoms and more laws for Internet? It's almost like robot shills. This is giving governments more control over business. This is not a good thing. I'd support a checkmark system like SSL in a browser that let people know if using a service could lead to leak of your information but not this. This just supports Google and Large Co to continue business as usual while killing smaller free service providers aka competition. People are celebrating less freedom on the net every time EU scratches a frigging freedom itch and it's disgusting.
Another example of big goverment attacking and undermining innovative businesses with terroristic laws and practises. I am American and many people are talking about this. Disgusting.
Si pecuniam haberem, panem emerem.
(est aliqualiter rationem)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Oh I am laughing. I bet you work for some jewish piece of shit silcon valley "startup" which absolutly should not exist, and you are BUTT MAD that my awesome new privacy protection pisses all over your rented juicier internet-of-bullshit-whatever.
Lalalalalalallamo! Holy shit I love being European, truely fortunate that I wasn't born a fat shit, lose asshole, wallmartian, who can do nothing except brown tongue your jewish masters all day on the interbutts.
I am eurphic that the GDPR is causing you so much butt hurt. Pooper peeved. Ass pained, lalalalalala.
Consumer protection laws are oppressive. REALLY? I mean REALLLLY, I am laughing at your life right now.
I am a huge fan of the EU. Not only because it's a bringing prosperity to my city (Brussels), is a net contributor to local and world peace, allows me to travel and pay more easily in a territory 50x as large as my own country, the Microsoft and Google lawsuits and many more reasons, but I truly despise the way they design the consumer protection laws.
Instead of punishing technology's abuses, they are really trying to make people's lives miserable.
Visiting a web site ? half of your screen is covered by the cookie warnings, even though 99,99% of website owners only actually use cookies for session management. And it would have taken very few effort for the lawmakers to add a "ignore and hide cooking warnings" general setting, which on EU scale would have made it to all browsers. This instead of just banning cookie tracking
Travelling across the border ? You'll get a SMS telling you that the tariff is....the same as home, which is nice, but that SMS / Tariff info was only relevant when operators were taking outrageous roaming fees. The message, though, is still mandatory.
Entering your car and want some navigation ? A stupid warning "driving while operating this device' is dangerous" (granted, that one may be even worse in the US)
And now GDPR: 99,99% of customer / subscriber information IS relevant, and is NOT used in abusive way. As a small non-profit sport club structure, it took us 2 months of iterative work to make ourselves minimally compliant, including a web site migration towards EU (on US owned servers). There is exactly zero gain for our members, whom we can not service if we don't have that minimum info from them, and which we have zero incentive to abuse. Of course, the have absolutely zero manpower to actually control/enforce the compliance in the millions of businesses and associations having files
All this while the ones most inclined to abuse their customers will still get away with it, and for which well-targeted raids might actually be cost effective.
Honest question. How are folks implementing backups that comply with GDPR? Seems there would be some cases where you couldn't backup data on a per-user basis. Mutable backups just seem totally wrong.
A lot of GDPR is clearly well thought out and easy to design too as a result. Migrating a non-GDPR based design could be a pain. But the requirements to be able discard backups in a month seems like it could be tricky in certain cases without compromising backup integrity.