“Because of #GDPR, USA Today decided to run a separate version of their website for EU users, which has all the tracking scripts and ads removed. The site seemed very fast, so I did a performance audit. How fast the internet could be without all the junk! ?
5.2MB → 500KB”
Source: twitter.com
For some of America’s biggest newspapers and online services, it’s easier to block half a billion people from accessing your product than comply with Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation. With about 500 million people living in the European Union, that’s a hard ban on one-and-a-half times the population of the U.S. A&E Television Networks has narrowed its EU blockade to limit the damage to its audience. Websites for its History and Lifetime channels greet the European visitors with a message that its ‘content is not available in your area,’ whereas the website for youth-focused Viceland remains accessible.
After reading an interview (german content) of the EU-Commisioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality Věra Jourová with the German newspaper “Die Zeit” in which she stated that the GDPR is so easy, even she could implement it, I got very curious and wanted to see how compliant the EU’s websites are. It took me less than five minutes to spot a violation: on the website of the EU Parliament Google Analytics is being used to track the visitors without the neccesary anonymizeIP flag, which in turn causes Google to store the complete IP address without anonymizing the last octet. You can take a look for yourself by checking the source code of this page (archived version in case it gets fixed in the meantime).