Nobody ended up in the morgue.
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Hey now, I’m a 60-yr old white guy and I think this fine gentleman is an absolute douche bag.
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Shame “Peddling” didn’t fit 
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Digilantes
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Richard Jewell would probably not agree with that assessment.
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The fact that the cops called his lawyer first and let the guy turn himself in rather than just arresting him (and trumping up extra charges of resisting arrest etc.) is clearly an attempt to help his defense. Its another of the long list of ways cops imbalance the scale of the justice system.
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I’m sure we could list several examples from the last month or two alone in which the police straight up MURDERED people based on a mistaken identity or address. Granted, it happens less frequently with white suspects.
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Okay then, if doxxing them is a bad idea (and it is) and telling the police is a bad idea… then what else is there?
FYI, this criminal has been arrested:
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Such as…
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More than likely this is not parochialism, but rather inability to achieve GDPR compliance. I work with clients who have had to block Europe until they can get compliant (which may never happen in some cases). Not saying the GDPR rules are right or wrong, but they are a lot of work to get compliant with, and some orgs (like cash-strapped city newspapers) don’t have the legal and web-development resources needed to do it.
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I wouldn’t mind because I use a VPN, but they often block European countries that don’t have GDPR.
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The GDPR applies to companies outside the EU because it is extra-territorial in scope. Specifically, the law is designed not so much to regulate businesses as it is to protect the data subjects’ rights. A “data subject” is any person in the EU, including citizens, residents, and even, perhaps, visitors.
What this means in practice is that if you collect any personal data of people in the EU, you are required to comply with the GDPR.
All they really need to do is not collect my personal data when I read a page on their website. It’s not very hard! Plenty of other tiddly local US news sites have figured it out.
With all due respect, you may recall I stated in my post that part of my job is getting systems GDPR compliant, so I know what is involved, and consider that it may be more difficult than you think. Modern software stacks are very complex, and not every part is under every vendor’s control. Just because “a bunch of newspapers” have done it, doesn’t mean it is easy or cheap to do so. I’m not saying GDPR is a bad idea, but again, part of my job that I do every day is achieving compliance with it, and I am telling you in my expert opinion that with some situations a lot of time and money is involved to make it happen.
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Forgive me. I had no intention to question your technical knowledge or expertise, or real-world client experience.
I appreciate that some software messes are more messy than others and less adaptable. (I also used to work in IT. There are, indeed, some software ‘stacks’ that are less ‘stack’ and more multi-layered archeological dig where the layers have been randomly mixed by haphazard annual field ploughing.)
So I appreciate that some situations may need more time and money than others, as you rightly point out.
Nevertheless, if they can tell that I am using (or spoofing) an IP address in the EU then not tracking me, really ought not to be that hard, in principle at least. And even if, for them, it is in practice so hard - a challenge involving so much effort/time/cost that they have failed to do something about it since GDPR was enacted four years ago! - the ongoing fact that they have not prioritised it, and have left the same disingenuous and unconvincing “we’re working on it, honest” message on their site for all that time, leads me to believe they do not care and have no serious intention to fix it - hence my accusation of parochialism.
But why should the Baltimore Sun care about readers from Europe? Especially if they have a shitty software mess that’s too hard to add rules to for identifying EU visitors and not storing their data.
But it’s funny how many (and it is many) US local news sources have exactly the same - identical wording/layout - i.e. the same actual page - for EU visitors. Almost as if they were all part of the same larger corporate … that has the same parochial “we don’t care about EU readers” position. Who knows.
But after all this time, my suspicion, absent any evidence to the contrary is that they will never do it, are not trying to and do not care. As you said yourself, “it may never happen”. If that is the case it is not because it is technically impossible, it is because they do not want it to happen sufficiently when set against the costs and their other priorities.
In which case I’d happily suffer a page that says, honestly (even if more subtly-worded) “you are in the EU and our site will not be available due to GDPR because it stops us grabbing your data and we do not feel the need to prioritise becoming GDPR compliant over serving our local readers” rather than a perennial “we’re trying to find a way, honest” fiction.
And while they may need technical resources that are scarce for them, these cash-strapped city newspapers hardly need much (if any) legal resources - they just need to stop capturing and storing personal data. What they’d need legal resources for is if they decide they do want to grab the data and store it, and it turns out to be EU citizen personal data. Why would they want that? Still, I suppose wanting it is a partial indication of lack of parochialism! But if they wanted it, they’d have found a way by now.
I’ll happily eat my words if any of these sites miraculously suddenly become available to EU visitors. After four years I’m not holding my breath.
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