GDPR and EAA/EU availability

We are definitely looking at some different options. There were huge industry changes being made even up through May 25 itself! As we said in the announcement:

"Until more clarity regarding methods of offering compliance is understood across the industry, our initial and necessary step is to block persons we recognize as coming from the EEA and EU to both preserve the rights of their citizens and ensure that our customers’ sites are not in violation."

Anyway, we are having another meeting this afternoon and I will try to share more details after that.

Thanks Christine. I know that a lot of it was in flux right up to the day of.

We are working on a new method that will allow individual items that likely require consent (i.e. some ads or widgets) to be blocked while allowing the full page to be read by EU/EEA users. This will be optional per site after you have determined your own compliance levels with your legal staff. We are working to have this available in the next week or so.

Separately, we are looking at consent tools and other options which can provide more fine-grained compliance other than blocking or widget blocking. This is still being investigated.

Hi Christine, just to circle back on this, we are starting to get several complaints from users traveling in the area. Could you provide an update when you get a chance? 

Also, have you (or anyone else) heard whether VPN software can allow the users to see sites? 

thanks, Rob

We got our first complaint this week as well, from one of our biggest advertisers who was traveling to London!

Ouch, Kevin! I know it's a super thorny problem for TN to solve, but it is definitely one that's going to get more urgent.

He was understanding but it made us realize we probably need to pay more attention to the issue then we had been.

Any more updates? Our complaints continue to roll in.

Starting to get complaints from "paying subscribers" on vacation overseas and unhappy they can't read the site.

We've had two complain so far. It would be nice if there was a splash page that details why the website is unavailable. To my knowledge the only way someone would know why would be if they read the Terms of Use but then they obviously have access to the website anyway.

I used this website to get a look at what those users are seeing: http://teleportyou.com

I agree the page they get could be a little nicer.

Hi guys! We are still working with our legal team on a solution. There are a lot of moving parts here!

We did issue a potential fix today that will help (we hope) the situation where a Facebook scraper comes from EU and you end up sharing the GDPR error message to Facebook (even though you and the article is in the US). Yuck! And, I'm very sorry if that happened to you. We added article meta data to the error page in hopes of preventing this issue. Let me know if you experience this again with articles posted after 12 pm today or so.

In terms of upcoming changes, we are working on several different scenarios and we hope to have at least our next phase done in a few weeks. Hopefully!

For the time being, you may want to get a head start by identifying any scripts, third parties or widgets that you use on your site and determine if they are GDPR compliant.

Hi Christine,

Do you know the date of the next release that may have a fix for this issue? We are having to refund our readers' their subscription fees in the UK.

Thanks,

Laura

Hi Laura! 

We are still working hard on offering sites the option to unblock EU/EEA traffic that Christine mentioned before.  We hope to roll this out in 1-2 weeks. We'll make an announcement once available. 

Thanks for your patience!

Hello,

It's been 2 weeks since the last update -- hoping for an updated timeline. I have not seen anything in our News dashboard with additional information.

Thanks!
Laura

Hi Laura, 

We are very close to making an announcement. Thanks again for your patience! 

So I've read the guidance sent in last week's release notes. But we'd basically have to build a new site. Anyone going to make an attempt at doing it on their own?

Why do you say you have to build a new site? I may have missed something.

https://www.townnews365.com/news_room/tips_tricks/gdpr-new-process-now-available/article_d3635d04-890d-11e8-a325-f763cdb1caac.html

We aren't going to turn off DFP for our whole site, so I don't know how we'd reach compliance without creating something different. But maybe I'm misreading this.

I have been trying to reply to this all day but have been in meetings! But just to put this out there quickly, and I will add more later tonight... but you won't need to build a new site. We just "wrap" any suspicious items with a code that checks for the request coming from the EU, and if it is from the EU, we turn off anything within that check.

In other words, we would essentially remove any non-compliant third party widgets from your site, ONLY when viewed from the EU.

We are still working on the next stage, which would be some kind of Consent Framework, but we still have many questions that we are still researching and trying to resolve.

Thanks for the clarification Christine. I guess when I read the release notes, it sounded like it was all on the sites to move forward on their own. If we want to move forward with the wrap and such, do we put in a ticket? How do we go ahead with this?

As of right now - yes, individual sites need to make the decision to allow EU traffic or not, based on their legal situation and/or advice from legal staff.

Yes, please put in a ticket! They will start you on the path... We need to ensure you move to our newest analytics code, and a few other things, and then you'll need to sign a addendum and then you can go live with the new EU "wrapped" solution which blocks third-party widgets when the page is viewed from an EEA country. =)

Hi Christine! Technical question: with this check be available in UTL? In other words, would we be able to use that check on our own as well?