So what is going on here with the GDPR stuff?

It’s possible that large portions of the GDPR do not apply to Fluther due to the decisions made by the EU’s Court of Justice in Wouters v Nederlandse Orde van Advocaten (2002) and FENIN v Commission (2006). Both drastically reduced the scope of what counts as “economic activity” under the law, and neither is affected by the recent changes to Article 3.

That said, the GDPR can only require the site to delete the categories of data that it explicitly protects. Even if we had to completely remove someone’s account (which is trivial for Ben), it would not require us to remove any of that person’s questions or answers (since the terms of service require jellies to grant Fluther non-exclusive publication rights).

So in short: the categories of data protected by the GDPR are not involved in any of the public-facing elements of Fluther, and removing protected data from the back end is pretty straightforward (though it requires a site administrator, not just any moderator, to do it).

So, this in Fluther Meta… so you’re asking the mods and/or owners if they’re going to do anything about the new EU law… what sort of thing might that be?

I believe there should be a opt-into all the tracking scripts the site runs. And people should at least be informed what is being collected.

@johnpowell For what it’s worth, I completely agree with you. But at present, the only person who can update the static pages is Ben. Can you glean anything from the information provided by uBlock Origin? If so, feel free to post it here.

I could be wrong here. I don’t think there are any ads on the site any longer. From what I know Ben just pays the bill out of a labor of love. If that is the case then removing the tracking stuff is easiest way to go forward.

Even google analytics is a problem under GDPR. If this is a hobby and they want a easy out stripping that stuff is the easiest out.

And yeah. I think this is unfortunate mess but I am glad it happened. And people knew what GDPR was two years ago. They said you “have two years to comply”. So people waited until the last day.

@johnpowell Makes sense they’d wait. Isn’t all this info they are receiving giving them money? Free money… Especially for big companies.

If Fluther doesn’t have commercial interests in any of the countries affected by the law, then why should compliance with that law even be a consideration? Who would care, and why?