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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).
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.
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.
Those kinds of jobs being lost is a gain for humanity.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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 !
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Subjective opinion, not a fact. I have no idea if it is a net gain or loss to humanity, but I suspect it is a loss, due to the totalitarian fascist nature of the law. The problem with Freedom is it is messy.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Protecting privacy is fascist, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Would somebody please think of the KZ-Guards...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Privacy is an illusion.
If you really want to be "private", hole up in a cave away from anyone so that nobody knows anything about you. Other than that, your privacy is subject to everyone you interact with. Ask any private detective how much information they can gather on someone just by watching their every move. Privacy is an assumption , and an illusion.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You might want to go to your safe space and play with crayons.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Safety is an illusion, why do you wear a seatbelt?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Si pecuniam haberem, panem emerem.
(est aliqualiter rationem)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.