I don't want to link to them because fuck them, though the current top comment contains a link to that site.
The interesting thing is that you get this error message on /us while when you remove it, you get redirected to /global and there is no such message. They went out of their way to collect the data of US citizens while still complying with the GDPR for other users.
Byjus is probably the second sussest company in India, so that checks out. They (sort of) sued banks that had lent them money for asking for it back.
How do you sort of sue someone?
Oh, they sued the banks, but gave some ridiculous excuse for it.
We are too lazy greedy fucks to do something about it
That website wants to collect and sell all the userdata without consent
Consent? That's just some woke word made up to damage family-owned businesses!
Them, probably.
To be fair, the founder of the business, Byju, used to be a very ordinary school teacher and then he built this whole thing. Not family-owned, nor born rich.
Fuck their business practices though
Or they can't or won't spend the time to comply to regulations of a region they might not do business in anyway.
It's not a business website, I opened it for some random math article.
If they aren't doing business in the EU, they don't need to comply with GDPR. While it technically protects EU citizens' data everywhere, in practice it's not possible to govern companies that are completely outside the EU.
Why is it basically only the EU that seems to have an interest in preventing shitty business practices.
Because the US is controlled by corporations
Asia for the most part doesn't care
Australia is run by right wing nut jobs
New Zealand is quiet so they probably do do something like this but we haven't heard about it.
Japan is Japan. Civil rights isn't really a thing.
And China and Russia love invasion of privacy it's basically the entire basis of their countries.
Well actshually...
Australia used to be run by right-wing nutjobs. The current mob in power are centrist nut jobs.
The power behind the throne in Australia is still right wing nut jobs and corporations
I feel like Australia and New Zealand is kind of like England and Scotland in that sense.
Australia is essentially just Texas out in a remote corner of the world. Just a bunch of mining and oil companies running a country.
So your telling me Capitalism is destroying the planet everywhere regardless of the nominal government "in charge"?
I'm really curious (as I'm not living there) what the difference is. Is it just their religious tendencies? Or is it their feelings towards the nebulous "other" that defines them?
In Australia there are two major political parties, Labor and Liberals.
Liberals does not mean what it does in the US, they are the right wing party, who are in a coalition with the Nationals party which is even further right wing.
Labor is now centre-right as they kept running on centre-left policies and losing.
The defining difference between the parties on the domestic front are that Labor supports and Liberals oppose
Social safety nets
Universal medical care
Taxation of corporations
On a foreign policy front they parties are broadly aligned however their stance on how to deal (interact) with China is vastly different, where Labor engages the Liberals attack China endlessly which resulted in a trade war which we're still feeling the effects of.
This is a very shallow examination of Australia's political landscape but I'm not a political commentator.
I am generally curious what you mean by centrist nut jobs? The whole point of the centre is to be somewhere in the middle and therefore the best of both worlds that everyone has something in common with as far as I’m concerned
There is no "best of both worlds" when one side wants you to be a fucking slave. Wake up, dummy.
How about just a little bit of servitude...?
....wait
“Best of both worlds” doesn't literally mean expressing everything on a numeric scale and averaging it out.
No, we know.
What's the best that should we take from the far right?
It's an ideological desert over there once you look past the race supremacy, inevitable oligarchy and people dying if they don't spend enough of their time struggling to survive. It's literally just psychopathic power grabbing when you really distill it down.
If any of that sounds good to you, I'm not interested in the world you want.
Support for centrism is either complete political ignorance, or looking at that desert and thinking "I think we need some of that shit over here"
Nothing. And neither should we take anything from the far left. It's the moderates that have good ideas.
Okay, humour me then, I'm clearly the ignorant one here.
Let's pretend that this centre which pulls from both sides is completely uninfluenced by the extremes somehow.
What's good about the not-quite-so-right that's unique compared against the far right then?
What's good about the not-quite-so-left that's unique from the far left?
Do these things marry up in a way that's not entirely ideologically bankrupt in the dissonance required?
Some things I like from the left:
The general idea of changing things that are bad instead of sticking to traditions
Gay marriage and other rights
More efficient and affordable healthcare
Abortion (though ideally I'd find it fair if “paper abortion” was also a thing)
FOSS (though most people don't have a strong opinion on that)
Public transportation
Some things I like from the right:
General cautiousness about the negative effects of new policies (for example, schools catering to problematic students at the expense of the other students)
Trying to minimize unnecessary government intervention
Support of free speech (used to be a leftist thing, seems to depend on who is being censored more)
Cautiousness about illegal immigration
Banning of harmful addictive drugs
And what I don't like about either:
Takes on gender/race equality (left tries to achieve it but has a different idea of what equality looks like, right seems content with inequality)
Voter fraud prevention (right wants the requirement of a driving license or something, left wants no verification at all; I like the normal system of requiring an identity card that every citizen gets for free from the government)
Based on these, I'd consider myself centrist or maybe a bit left-leaning, but the far left would consider me a Nazi and the far right would consider me a communist or something.
Also note that I'm not from the USA and I see USA politics through the lens of what I know to work and not work in my country.
So, gonna do the context bit before I dive in, because you seem to be engaging in good faith. Apologies though, this is probably gonna be a few lines and a little disorganised, but I'll try and address everything you've said. Here goes:
If you'd not guessed already I'm very much left wing. My ideal world looks something like an ideology called anarcho-syndicalism, though I'm not going to pretend I know that's the perfect system, just something roughly in that shape seems like the ideal system to benefit the most people. This is partially guided by my belief that centralisation of power breeds corruption. It's also worth highlighting, I'm not sure my ideal world is showing up any time soon, but I'm convinced it's the direction we should be moving in. It's never good to treat ideology as religion, no one has all the answers, but politics without ideology is aimlessly bankrupt.
Anyway, your response—firstly it seems to be you're muddying left vs right and authoritarian vs liberal/libertarian (the US has ruined both of the real definitions of these terms, when I say libertarian going forward I mean the original French definition tied to liberty, not the knuckle dragging ancaps) a bit. Left vs right can generally be simplified as cooperation Vs competition. Left wingers believe the best outcomes come from working together, right wingers believe competition creates the best outcome. Pretty much all the rest of the ideology flows from those conclusions. Authoritarians believe society needs to be controlled to remain, libertarians (again, not the capitalist knuckle draggers) believe people should be free to make their own choices.
There's a hell of a lot of other ways to split politics up (for example nationalist vs internationalist is another split, given you mentioned immigration, or religious vs secular, republican vs monarchist, the list goes on), but generally the left/right, auth/lib splits seem to be the ones that people polarise around.
As you note, you're not in the US, neither am I. I'm in the UK where we have had an authoritarian right-wing party in power for getting close to a decade and a half. A great example is that we are subjected to the most surveillance in the world outside of China here. You often hear people saying right wing parties are all about limiting government intervention (as you have), but this is patently not the case. Surveillance in my country has been massively expanded under the Tories.
To address your point around cautiousness, they've recently been trying to force tech companies to put backdoors in their encryption to allow them to read people's encrypted messages (iMessage, WhatsApp, telegram, etc). Everyone with a pulse remotely connected to the technology industry has been telling them how universally stupid this idea is (this post is long enough, so ask if you're not clear as to why this is ridiculous). They're planning on forging on ahead putting something effectively impossible or dangerous into law. That's not caution, it's reckless.
What is free speech? Some right wingers seem to be banging on about "free speech absolutism" recently, which seems to boil down to the childish notion that "it's my right to say what I like without consequence, and everyone has to listen". That's something that never has and never will exist. No one has to listen to anyone, and further, if someone is freely talking shit, someone else can freely talk shit back at them. As for what I'm assuming you're getting at regarding censorship, a reductio ad absurdum argument: I don't think you'd disagree that it's pretty damn harmful for someone to follow a suicidal person around 24/7 shouting "kill yourself" over and over, right? (At least I really hope you're with me on this one) So, pretty uncontroversial to try and prevent that scenario right? Preventing some cruel bastard pushing someone over the edge is more important than the bastard's right to say what he likes, right? There are several similar situations where speech can cause harm that may end up damaging if not fatal. This is the free speech the right-wingers are getting frothed up about. At the same time in my country the right wing government is attempting to ban peaceful protest. Funnily enough, a pattern emerges again, it's free speech for them, not for their opponents.
This is already getting far too long so I'm gonna do a lightning round for your other points
Cautiousness about immigration. Illegal or not, Immigration is pretty much always a neutral or positive force. More often than not, any negatives you read about are often unusual cases or cherry picked stories amplified to further a political agenda. Funnily enough illegal immigrants are often a net fiscal benefit because they're often unable to access any public services, yet contribute tax at the very least via VAT/sales taxes.
Banning drugs creates more drug addicts because people are less likely or even able to seek help. It also makes organised crime inevitable, the south American drug cartels would not exist if they couldn't sell drugs to people. No one is going to buy dodgy illegal drugs if there's a better option.
Public transportation.... What? That's a lefty thing. Not sure how you've got that one mixed up.
And now your don't like in either bit:
Takes on equality, I'm not sure what your third option is given you've highlighted the left is trying to do something about it and the right isn't. Maybe I'm misreading you.
Voter fraud prevention, so this is an interesting one. It's not intuitive at all, but adding or changing restrictions on voting will always prevent some legitimate people from voting. A simple example (one of many) is that a new requirement comes in and now you need to bring a driving licence with you, uninformed Bob shows up on polling day and is told he needs a driving licence to vote. Bob doesn't have a driving licence because he has a disability that prevents it, he's told there's a scheme that he could have used to send off for a special ID for people in his situation. Well, he's not gonna be able to get that done before the polling is closed. Bob's now prevented from voting, despite being legally entitled to.
Now, you might think that's an acceptable cost to prevent voter fraud. There's never been any amount of meaningful voter fraud found to be happening in any modern fair election. Funnily it's pretty much always the politicians complaining about voter fraud that are trying to unfairly influence things.
Now, I'm obviously coming at this from a left wing perspective, I've been up front about that (and sorry for the essay, you got me when I was bored, I didn't think I'd be typing for 10 mins). If you even partially agree with what I've said, can you maybe see that in the most charitable assessment, centrism is simply a lack of understanding rather than a consistent ideology?
(Again, really did not intend for a post this length soz)
You forgot Africa, South America, Canada, Greenland(?).
Greenland is a part of Denmark so in the EU
Well yes, but actually no. Greenland is part of Denmark, which is in the EU, but Greenland is not in the EU.
But the Data Protection Authority is the same and they have quite similar laws, most likely completely compliant with EU regulations. Both because cultural connections as well as them wanting to position themselves as a location for internet infrastructure.
Countries like Iceland straight-up implement GDPR because EEA. I'd say both could easily be convinced to become EU members by reforming the fisheries policy into something sane, both when it comes to size of quotas (the EU could pull an order of magnitude more fish out of the water if we'd let stocks recover to the levels from 100 years ago) and distribution of quotas -- coasts should be considered (more) like mineral deposits: We're not getting any Austrian silver either why are they getting our fish, if they want to fish they can buy quotas from a coastal state.
Africa is still developing so data privacy is the least of their concerns. They’re focusing on creating stable corruption free governments that don’t undergo a coup or civil war every 5 years, and having a hell of a time with that.
Africa is an enormous continent, it contains 53 different countries and what you said is only true of a handful of them.
I don't blame you, I blame the eurocentric educational system and news media.
that don’t undergo a coup or civil war every 5 years, and having a hell of a time with that.
If by "having a hell of a time with that" you mean "the US loves shutting down developing nations", absolutely.
There is no evidence the US has been involved in the last several coups, we’ve been supporting efforts at fair democratic processes and development in Africa for years.
Good joke. The US is literally AT ALL TIMES trying to destabilize any country that could potentially pose a problem to their hegemony. As recently as 2022 it has been PROVEN that US agencies tried (unsuccessfully) to undermine Brazilian democracy, as an example. (Before you try to change subjects - yes, Brazil is not in Africa. It's just a concrete example you can't dodge with argumentation).
I would like to point the RWNJs finally got voted out in Oz last year (federal and most states). Of course Murdoch and co. are working hard to reverse that, but semi sane leadership is in place for at least a year or two more.
China and Russia are dictatorships meaning they do whatever the fucknthey like and if you don't like it you might become suicidal.
As with most things in the US, California has similar laws to the gdpr (though admittedly not as powerful), so a lot of websites are starting to change a bit in the US because of california.
Moatly about capitalism i think. If you put on privacy restrictions, you are regulating the market, while capitalism believes that the market should regulate itself, and customers will simply stop using those websites/softwares overtime if its too bad. I find this completely delusional in the era of mega corporations, but thats the capitalistic aproach to this.
capitalism believes that the market should regulate itself
Anarcho-capitalism ⊊ capitalism.
EU is capitalist, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. Maybe you're just another person blaming everything on capitalism because that's easier than understanding the actual problems. Might as well blame it on the prevalent system.
Im not exactly against capitalism, but i do think that a hardcore capitalistic aproach such as the one in the US has many downsides.
Please try not to throw insults or mean assumptions. We are here to discuss.
The EU is a social market economy. It currently slants more capitalist but nothing whatsoever stops member states from taxing the hell out of billionaires shifting it more towards market socialism.
What really doesn't fly in the EU is the free market <-> unregulated market equivocation that peddlers of institutional market failure enjoy so much. The free market model relies on perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information, in the real world you need regulation to approach that ideal. If you want to see actually unregulated markets have a look at black ones where there's not even regulations against offers you can't refuse.
And that's why the EU is legislating things like caps having to stay attached to plastic bottles: Because not doing it would allow companies to continue to externalise microplastic problems they generate and, innovation costing money, they wouldn't do it on their own (the new caps aren't even more expensive per piece it's just some R&D and very small changes to bottling machines.)
Because they listen to people rather than ignore them and then make policy based on how much money they can make from the deal.
This shows me the EU is actually more democratic then the US is.
It's much harder to pay off the lawmakers to keep the status quo when the economic area is controlled by dozens of individual governments.
This is actually a particularly important point. The nature of the EU is laden with bureaucracy. Combined with the wide range of cultures, and the rotation of staff, it makes bribing enough people to get your way difficult. You end up needing people in multiple countries to deal with it, and the rotations make long term deals difficult.
The end result is that bribing EU bureaucracy is like trying to stop a river with just hands. It's far less effective, letting the EU be a lot more effective (if slow).
There's a reason so many big business interests want to break up the EU.
Shouldn't it be the same in the US with state and federal governments?
All of the states are owned by one of the same two political parties, and their respective goals are more or less aligned on a state-by-state level, bordering on zealotry.
America is, effectively a monoculture. At least in the UK, there is more variance in accents over 100 miles than over all of the US. The EU has a wide selection of languages and cultures, all with deep histories and quirks. Methods that work in 1 culture will be insulting in another. America is practically setup for mass deployment of propaganda and industrial bribery , sorry lobbying.
The US was originally more like the EU but it federalized pretty hard after the civil war.
Brazil also has a similar law called LGPD, I think it was made based on European GDPR
Actually, and I'm quite proud of this, the LGPD was already being discussed before the EU's GDPR. It may not look like it, but Brazil is at the forefront of digital protection and privacy.
Yah, I just get Google to block these sites from ever being recommended again.
Is bribery political donations not a thing in Europe?
I want more predatory websites to do this so that I can avoid them.
Anyone out of the EU can VPN to an EU country and benefit.
Some idiots keep using one of my email adresses for god knows what, ending up in me receiving newsletters and shit. Since actual user accounts are associated, I typically recover the password (since its my email adress) and then delete the account.
There are a few websites with similar restrictions though. They are completely fine sending shit to email adresses they never bothered to verify, but reject logins from countries (or even US states!) that they don't want. Morons.
that's when you report as spam. that shit hurts their trust rating and makes their emails more likely to end up in people's spam folders, pretty much killing their newsletter
Or auto forward it to their customer service email, or company email.
You only tell them your email is active with that.
Oh boy, that is a great idea. Every time they email me their shitty newsletter I get to create a new support ticket telling them I don't want it. Auto forward seems so nice.
You forward it to them and add that you want to exercise your rights to be forgotten.
Also report to the regulator in your jurisdiction (I believe FTC in the US) because sending unsolicited emails that the user cannot unsubscribe from is illegal in most places.
This is fine imo. If you don’t want to comply, don’t. You just don’t get to extract EU data
Right, at least they are honest about it and - in a way- comply with GDPR by avoiding it.
Yes, but it shows how they behave toward people who aren't in the EU.
Perfect. Would be nice if US implemented the same regulations
Personal data is an enormous market in the US. Too many big players located here. It'd never happen unfortunately. We'd need to replace all of Congress with folks who actually care about rights and people instead of money. We have only a handful on the left and that's only in the house, and that's being generous. I haven't seen any attempts really on the right. So it'd be a long time until this is even remotely possible. I'd be amazed to see a senator actually care about people though. Or even a governor.
Don't forget the centrists, who want a happy medium between you being a product for someone else's money, and having privacy. Because, you know, a lack of privacy is totally cool or something...
Sadly, I live in the U.S., so if I went to this website, it would definitely take my data and sell it.
We don't get a GDPR to protect us. Be glad you do.
Proxy using an EU based server. Not like websites are going to actually check that you live there.
If you use a EU proxy for the site in OPs screenshot you would presumably just get the same message.
No thanks, I like fast internet.
I mean, honestly, you'd have to already have poor Internet to not be able to max out most connections regardless. It's the lag that is affected and it's likely still under a second.
I don't know, I used to use a VPN to France (not the same server each time) when I was downloading torrents, and when I forgot to turn it off, uploads for work were glacial. High upload speed is really necessary for my work because I regularly upload files which are half a gigabyte or more and need to get that done as quickly as possible. Now I VPN to Canada and I don't really have that problem anymore.
Uploads would likely be a lot more affected as your connection is very lopsided. I should have been more specific that down is a lot more difficult to max out. And uploads are more affected by your connection speed. So yeah, uploads you may see a difference. Depending on what you're torrenting though, VPN is likely safer for that to begin with.
A torrent client may need settings in the client changed, firewall rules changed, and ports open on the router. Even with all that a VPN could still have a limited connection. Some VPNs allow you control over this but I doubt free ones do
Things are changing rapidly but asynchronous upload/download speeds are not always offered by ISPs and uploading was always slower than downloading... used to be never but I've seen more and more ISPs offer asynchronous speeds
There are a huge number of factors that we don't know that could account for your slower speeds
Fair enough, I'm not an expert. I just know what I experienced when I used the VPN (PrivateInternetAccess FWIW). I didn't change any settings on it.
Upload speeds will be a lot slower than downloads speeds because VPNs are optimised for downloading. That's one you mate.
Ok, how was I supposed to know that exactly?
Eh? You are giving VPNs a bad review without knowing how to use them effectively. There is nothing wrong with not knowing something only with assuming.
Considering I use my VPN almost every day, how am I giving them a bad review? I even said I didn't have this problem when I connected to Canada.
Why do you need a GDPR to protect you? If you don't want tracking cookies then don't let web sites write them to your computer. You are in charge of your computer.
Wish it was that simple. The problem with the internet, as a whole, is someone figured out they can collect just about everything from your data, with or without cookies, and sell it to big companies.
Everything is about that almighty dollar. We are now the product under the guise of being a consumer.
You want to complain about access being blocked because of where you live, fine just makes you an easy commodity to sell to someone else.
Tbf, you want complete anonymity, stay off the web, don’t use bank accounts or credit cards, not even those like cash app, become a hermit and tell everyone to fuck off as you are not for sale.
In reality, it’s policies, like the GDPR, that are actually looking out for your best interest. Here in America the arguement would be “they’re taking away my freedom” or “the government is overreaching” instead of “Hey, someone actually cares about my privacy in the government!”
Like I have said in another group, people complain about their privacy online and then use the likes of chrome for their browser. We say we care about our privacy, but in the end we are a tool that doesn’t do the job we need done.
The thing is, if someone makes observations about you, and save that in the form of data, that's not your data. It's their data. It might be about you, but people are allowed to observe and sell their observations.
This is true. However, they need to inform you that they are collecting this data, what data they are collecting, and why, and give you the option to opt out of that data collection.
Just because they can doesn’t give them the right to do so without your explicit permission.
Why? I'm allowed to stand at a street corner and watch people walk by. I'm allowed to count them, and observe the direction they're going. I don't need any of their permission to do this. I'm allowed to know who they are, and I'm allowed to tell anyone I want what I saw. I'm allowed to charge money for it, and none of the people I observe are a party to this at all, so why should I need to either not do this, or tell them what I'm doing or ask for their permission to remember what I saw? How is internet tracking different?
Because they use personally identifying I for other than what you saw. In your comment does that mean you have a right to follow their personal life and invade it then sell it to others? No!
Your problem is you like being a commodity rather than just a consumer. You don’t mind your life being intruded on which could include cc numbers or bank account info. You want to lose your money like that that’s fine. Me personally, they can get out of my life and quit following what I want to do just to make a quick buck. Fuck that, me and my personal information is not for sale! And if anyone seems to think it is, I will stop them as that is my right.
Personally I think all tracking cookies should be banned on the internet worldwide! I am not a commodity.
I think there's a difference here where there's a reasonable expectation of privacy, and where there is not. Out on the sidewalk, you don't have one. Selling someone's CC is a violation of contract law because you do have an expectation of privacy there. So, we have to be very clear, what kind of data are we talking about? "Sharon Thomas visited this site, looked at these items, spent 14.2 seconds looking at that item, then clicked on this link," I think, is not something you can expect privacy from.
However, there are some things I do think you have an expectation of privacy from, which is the collation and sale of personal information that the customer enters into the site for the purposes of business with that site, like the collation names with addresses, driver's license numbers, social security numbers (or whatever local equivalents), etc. Another thing is that, and I don't know if I'm 100% right here, but I believe that when you visit a site, even by typing an address into the address bar, the site you're visiting is told, by your browser, what site you're coming from. That doesn't make sense to me, and that's not a thing that should exist.
Nonetheless, I don't think the GDPR is a good fit for addressing any of these issues.
Cookies aren't nearly the only form of tracking.
EU for the win.
Well, this is what you wanted isn't it? Your government is protecting you, anyone who can't comply can't serve you.
I read that as you being facetious, but: Yes this is exactly what I want. If a service can not comply with GDPR, the service should not be accessible. It would be great for their customers if the service decided to change their practices to become compliant, but that is a business decision they need to make.
Adding to that: Compliance is not even that hard to implement. I build almost all of my websites with GDPR compliance in mind and it's not really a big deal. There are easy to use tools like Cookie Consent and some of the sites don't even need a banner at all if they have no tracking (which you know, is completely possible too).
Cookie consent is the tip of the iceberg for GDPR compliance. If you're not collecting any user data for any reason, such as account creation, then you're probably ok with cookie consent, but GDPR is non trivial to comply with for companies collecting personal data.
Well I'm only being facetious insomuch as the OP is annoyed at a perfectly predictable outcome of laws that Europeans wanted. I'm very critical of the GDPR, I do want laws that prevent data harvesting but I just don't think the GDPR was the right approach.
Not "can't comply" but "doesn't want to comply". Other than that fully agreed, it is what I wanted.
Oh no! What will I do now without the prescient geopolitical insight of the Chattanooga Evening Telegraph?
The OP is irritated for some reason, I guess they really wanted that insight.
No, I just don't want sites like this to appear in my search results.
anyone who can’t comply can’t serve you.
That's not true. If the company isn't doing business in the EU, they don't need to comply with the GDPR. What I mean is, they're entirely outside the jurisdiction of the EU and are not required to comply with any EU law. If the EU decides they want to force a non-EU company to comply, they have no ability to do so.
Serving ads to Europeans is doing business in the EU, and the US and EU have reciprocal civil enforcement mechanisms.
It's for the greater good, but it's also somewhat against the intention of the law, IMO.
Dataprotection is meant to give users control of their data. A restriction like that takes away a bit of my control, however, since it prevents me from doing whatever the fuck I want with my data.
But again: greater good. It also protects people who don't know what they are doing.
It's a highly controversial tech company into online education in India. Controversial because they were a highly valued but hugely loss making company and then they apparently fudged their financials, Deloitte quit as their auditor, they underpaid and laid off 1000s of employees/educators, and cheated customers/parents into buying expensive bundles through super aggressive marketing where not so savvy customers were "bullied" into making purchases that are hard to unsubscribe
Doesn't help much if you live in the EU because the reason this post exists.
I think they want to know if it is safe to click at work. Which seems like it is but the wiki link is more helpful.
I wish more invasive websites would do this.
Trust me, you don't want to visit that website (company).Its sales and marketing methods are scam at best.
Shows how broken the internet was and still is, basically the homeland of the internet is incapable of building pages that comply with basic regulation.
Incapable is not the same as refuses to.
I got to agree. Maybe they just don't understand or agree to what compliance involves. Company could be busy making widgets and not want to risk lawsuits from a region they don't directly do business with anyway.
Nah. It's because they want to sell data. It's super easy to comply unless you collect data from visitors. And you literally just have to say "if you click no, then we won't collect data". Some sites go out of their way to actually force you to opt out of every single cookie.
I need to know what this website is, so that I never use it.
Byju, it is an educational group known for its exploitative practices in selling over priced study materials for primary and secondary education in India and also for competitive exams.
It's actually in the screenshot. Kind of hidden though.
Just another lazy American company not wanting to protect user data and using GPDR as an excuse.
Sure it takes work to treat user data properly but from a consumer perspective it is the right thing to do. Throwing shade at Europe because you don't want to do it doesn't seem the most productive thing to do.
lazy American company
This company is headquartered in Bangalore.
Still lazy! ;)
Translation: We are not allowing you to use our services in the EU due to better data privacy laws than the US.
🤷♂️ use another service if the nanny state controls your pipes.
Get a VPN.
Nah, I don't want to visit a site that publicly admits to invasive tracking.
Remember, you voted for this
I mean, I'm happy that the law is working.
Then why are you complaining about it?
Because they're so committed to stealing and selling your data, that they would rather not serve you at all if they can't get it. That's a fault of the site, not the law.
Fix your governance and get rid of the GDPR, and the problem will be solved.
"The solution is to just give up your rights to privacy, doy!"
You don't have to give up your rights to privacy to get rid of the GDPR. The GDPR isn't the reason you have any rights to privacy, nor does it actually effect any. What it effects is an entitlement to be forgotten and to move in anonymity when your identity is clearly observable and memorable. It's an overreach, and some people don't feel like dealing with it.
"Oh hey, our tracking is so invasive that it is illegal in your part of the world and we are too lazy to do something about it."
Dodged a bullet there. Thanks EU
I don't want to link to them because fuck them, though the current top comment contains a link to that site.
The interesting thing is that you get this error message on /us while when you remove it, you get redirected to /global and there is no such message. They went out of their way to collect the data of US citizens while still complying with the GDPR for other users.
Byjus is probably the second sussest company in India, so that checks out. They (sort of) sued banks that had lent them money for asking for it back.
How do you sort of sue someone?
Oh, they sued the banks, but gave some ridiculous excuse for it.
We are too
lazygreedy fucks to do something about itThat website wants to collect and sell all the userdata without consent
Them, probably.
To be fair, the founder of the business, Byju, used to be a very ordinary school teacher and then he built this whole thing. Not family-owned, nor born rich.
Fuck their business practices though
Or they can't or won't spend the time to comply to regulations of a region they might not do business in anyway.
It's not a business website, I opened it for some random math article.
If they aren't doing business in the EU, they don't need to comply with GDPR. While it technically protects EU citizens' data everywhere, in practice it's not possible to govern companies that are completely outside the EU.
Why is it basically only the EU that seems to have an interest in preventing shitty business practices.
Because the US is controlled by corporations
Asia for the most part doesn't care
Australia is run by right wing nut jobs
New Zealand is quiet so they probably do do something like this but we haven't heard about it.
Japan is Japan. Civil rights isn't really a thing.
And China and Russia love invasion of privacy it's basically the entire basis of their countries.
Well actshually... Australia used to be run by right-wing nutjobs. The current mob in power are centrist nut jobs.
The power behind the throne in Australia is still right wing nut jobs and corporations
I feel like Australia and New Zealand is kind of like England and Scotland in that sense.
Australia is essentially just Texas out in a remote corner of the world. Just a bunch of mining and oil companies running a country.
So your telling me Capitalism is destroying the planet everywhere regardless of the nominal government "in charge"?
I'm really curious (as I'm not living there) what the difference is. Is it just their religious tendencies? Or is it their feelings towards the nebulous "other" that defines them?
In Australia there are two major political parties, Labor and Liberals.
Liberals does not mean what it does in the US, they are the right wing party, who are in a coalition with the Nationals party which is even further right wing.
Labor is now centre-right as they kept running on centre-left policies and losing.
The defining difference between the parties on the domestic front are that Labor supports and Liberals oppose
Social safety nets
Universal medical care
Taxation of corporations
On a foreign policy front they parties are broadly aligned however their stance on how to deal (interact) with China is vastly different, where Labor engages the Liberals attack China endlessly which resulted in a trade war which we're still feeling the effects of.
This is a very shallow examination of Australia's political landscape but I'm not a political commentator.
I am generally curious what you mean by centrist nut jobs? The whole point of the centre is to be somewhere in the middle and therefore the best of both worlds that everyone has something in common with as far as I’m concerned
There is no "best of both worlds" when one side wants you to be a fucking slave. Wake up, dummy.
How about just a little bit of servitude...?
....wait
“Best of both worlds” doesn't literally mean expressing everything on a numeric scale and averaging it out.
No, we know.
What's the best that should we take from the far right?
It's an ideological desert over there once you look past the race supremacy, inevitable oligarchy and people dying if they don't spend enough of their time struggling to survive. It's literally just psychopathic power grabbing when you really distill it down.
If any of that sounds good to you, I'm not interested in the world you want.
Support for centrism is either complete political ignorance, or looking at that desert and thinking "I think we need some of that shit over here"
Nothing. And neither should we take anything from the far left. It's the moderates that have good ideas.
Okay, humour me then, I'm clearly the ignorant one here.
Let's pretend that this centre which pulls from both sides is completely uninfluenced by the extremes somehow.
What's good about the not-quite-so-right that's unique compared against the far right then?
What's good about the not-quite-so-left that's unique from the far left?
Do these things marry up in a way that's not entirely ideologically bankrupt in the dissonance required?
Some things I like from the left:
Some things I like from the right:
And what I don't like about either:
Based on these, I'd consider myself centrist or maybe a bit left-leaning, but the far left would consider me a Nazi and the far right would consider me a communist or something.
Also note that I'm not from the USA and I see USA politics through the lens of what I know to work and not work in my country.
So, gonna do the context bit before I dive in, because you seem to be engaging in good faith. Apologies though, this is probably gonna be a few lines and a little disorganised, but I'll try and address everything you've said. Here goes:
If you'd not guessed already I'm very much left wing. My ideal world looks something like an ideology called anarcho-syndicalism, though I'm not going to pretend I know that's the perfect system, just something roughly in that shape seems like the ideal system to benefit the most people. This is partially guided by my belief that centralisation of power breeds corruption. It's also worth highlighting, I'm not sure my ideal world is showing up any time soon, but I'm convinced it's the direction we should be moving in. It's never good to treat ideology as religion, no one has all the answers, but politics without ideology is aimlessly bankrupt.
Anyway, your response—firstly it seems to be you're muddying left vs right and authoritarian vs liberal/libertarian (the US has ruined both of the real definitions of these terms, when I say libertarian going forward I mean the original French definition tied to liberty, not the knuckle dragging ancaps) a bit. Left vs right can generally be simplified as cooperation Vs competition. Left wingers believe the best outcomes come from working together, right wingers believe competition creates the best outcome. Pretty much all the rest of the ideology flows from those conclusions. Authoritarians believe society needs to be controlled to remain, libertarians (again, not the capitalist knuckle draggers) believe people should be free to make their own choices.
There's a hell of a lot of other ways to split politics up (for example nationalist vs internationalist is another split, given you mentioned immigration, or religious vs secular, republican vs monarchist, the list goes on), but generally the left/right, auth/lib splits seem to be the ones that people polarise around.
As you note, you're not in the US, neither am I. I'm in the UK where we have had an authoritarian right-wing party in power for getting close to a decade and a half. A great example is that we are subjected to the most surveillance in the world outside of China here. You often hear people saying right wing parties are all about limiting government intervention (as you have), but this is patently not the case. Surveillance in my country has been massively expanded under the Tories.
To address your point around cautiousness, they've recently been trying to force tech companies to put backdoors in their encryption to allow them to read people's encrypted messages (iMessage, WhatsApp, telegram, etc). Everyone with a pulse remotely connected to the technology industry has been telling them how universally stupid this idea is (this post is long enough, so ask if you're not clear as to why this is ridiculous). They're planning on forging on ahead putting something effectively impossible or dangerous into law. That's not caution, it's reckless.
What is free speech? Some right wingers seem to be banging on about "free speech absolutism" recently, which seems to boil down to the childish notion that "it's my right to say what I like without consequence, and everyone has to listen". That's something that never has and never will exist. No one has to listen to anyone, and further, if someone is freely talking shit, someone else can freely talk shit back at them. As for what I'm assuming you're getting at regarding censorship, a reductio ad absurdum argument: I don't think you'd disagree that it's pretty damn harmful for someone to follow a suicidal person around 24/7 shouting "kill yourself" over and over, right? (At least I really hope you're with me on this one) So, pretty uncontroversial to try and prevent that scenario right? Preventing some cruel bastard pushing someone over the edge is more important than the bastard's right to say what he likes, right? There are several similar situations where speech can cause harm that may end up damaging if not fatal. This is the free speech the right-wingers are getting frothed up about. At the same time in my country the right wing government is attempting to ban peaceful protest. Funnily enough, a pattern emerges again, it's free speech for them, not for their opponents.
This is already getting far too long so I'm gonna do a lightning round for your other points
Cautiousness about immigration. Illegal or not, Immigration is pretty much always a neutral or positive force. More often than not, any negatives you read about are often unusual cases or cherry picked stories amplified to further a political agenda. Funnily enough illegal immigrants are often a net fiscal benefit because they're often unable to access any public services, yet contribute tax at the very least via VAT/sales taxes.
Banning drugs creates more drug addicts because people are less likely or even able to seek help. It also makes organised crime inevitable, the south American drug cartels would not exist if they couldn't sell drugs to people. No one is going to buy dodgy illegal drugs if there's a better option.
Public transportation.... What? That's a lefty thing. Not sure how you've got that one mixed up.
And now your don't like in either bit:
Takes on equality, I'm not sure what your third option is given you've highlighted the left is trying to do something about it and the right isn't. Maybe I'm misreading you.
Voter fraud prevention, so this is an interesting one. It's not intuitive at all, but adding or changing restrictions on voting will always prevent some legitimate people from voting. A simple example (one of many) is that a new requirement comes in and now you need to bring a driving licence with you, uninformed Bob shows up on polling day and is told he needs a driving licence to vote. Bob doesn't have a driving licence because he has a disability that prevents it, he's told there's a scheme that he could have used to send off for a special ID for people in his situation. Well, he's not gonna be able to get that done before the polling is closed. Bob's now prevented from voting, despite being legally entitled to.
Now, you might think that's an acceptable cost to prevent voter fraud. There's never been any amount of meaningful voter fraud found to be happening in any modern fair election. Funnily it's pretty much always the politicians complaining about voter fraud that are trying to unfairly influence things.
Now, I'm obviously coming at this from a left wing perspective, I've been up front about that (and sorry for the essay, you got me when I was bored, I didn't think I'd be typing for 10 mins). If you even partially agree with what I've said, can you maybe see that in the most charitable assessment, centrism is simply a lack of understanding rather than a consistent ideology?
(Again, really did not intend for a post this length soz)
You forgot Africa, South America, Canada, Greenland(?).
Greenland is a part of Denmark so in the EU
Well yes, but actually no. Greenland is part of Denmark, which is in the EU, but Greenland is not in the EU.
But the Data Protection Authority is the same and they have quite similar laws, most likely completely compliant with EU regulations. Both because cultural connections as well as them wanting to position themselves as a location for internet infrastructure.
Countries like Iceland straight-up implement GDPR because EEA. I'd say both could easily be convinced to become EU members by reforming the fisheries policy into something sane, both when it comes to size of quotas (the EU could pull an order of magnitude more fish out of the water if we'd let stocks recover to the levels from 100 years ago) and distribution of quotas -- coasts should be considered (more) like mineral deposits: We're not getting any Austrian silver either why are they getting our fish, if they want to fish they can buy quotas from a coastal state.
I also had to look this up but Greenland is not in the EU
Africa is still developing so data privacy is the least of their concerns. They’re focusing on creating stable corruption free governments that don’t undergo a coup or civil war every 5 years, and having a hell of a time with that.
Africa is an enormous continent, it contains 53 different countries and what you said is only true of a handful of them.
I don't blame you, I blame the eurocentric educational system and news media.
If by "having a hell of a time with that" you mean "the US loves shutting down developing nations", absolutely.
There is no evidence the US has been involved in the last several coups, we’ve been supporting efforts at fair democratic processes and development in Africa for years.
Good joke. The US is literally AT ALL TIMES trying to destabilize any country that could potentially pose a problem to their hegemony. As recently as 2022 it has been PROVEN that US agencies tried (unsuccessfully) to undermine Brazilian democracy, as an example. (Before you try to change subjects - yes, Brazil is not in Africa. It's just a concrete example you can't dodge with argumentation).
I would like to point the RWNJs finally got voted out in Oz last year (federal and most states). Of course Murdoch and co. are working hard to reverse that, but semi sane leadership is in place for at least a year or two more.
China and Russia are dictatorships meaning they do whatever the fucknthey like and if you don't like it you might become suicidal.
As with most things in the US, California has similar laws to the gdpr (though admittedly not as powerful), so a lot of websites are starting to change a bit in the US because of california.
Moatly about capitalism i think. If you put on privacy restrictions, you are regulating the market, while capitalism believes that the market should regulate itself, and customers will simply stop using those websites/softwares overtime if its too bad. I find this completely delusional in the era of mega corporations, but thats the capitalistic aproach to this.
Anarcho-capitalism ⊊ capitalism.
EU is capitalist, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. Maybe you're just another person blaming everything on capitalism because that's easier than understanding the actual problems. Might as well blame it on the prevalent system.
Im not exactly against capitalism, but i do think that a hardcore capitalistic aproach such as the one in the US has many downsides.
Please try not to throw insults or mean assumptions. We are here to discuss.
The EU is a social market economy. It currently slants more capitalist but nothing whatsoever stops member states from taxing the hell out of billionaires shifting it more towards market socialism.
What really doesn't fly in the EU is the free market <-> unregulated market equivocation that peddlers of institutional market failure enjoy so much. The free market model relies on perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information, in the real world you need regulation to approach that ideal. If you want to see actually unregulated markets have a look at black ones where there's not even regulations against offers you can't refuse.
And that's why the EU is legislating things like caps having to stay attached to plastic bottles: Because not doing it would allow companies to continue to externalise microplastic problems they generate and, innovation costing money, they wouldn't do it on their own (the new caps aren't even more expensive per piece it's just some R&D and very small changes to bottling machines.)
Because they listen to people rather than ignore them and then make policy based on how much money they can make from the deal.
This shows me the EU is actually more democratic then the US is.
It's much harder to pay off the lawmakers to keep the status quo when the economic area is controlled by dozens of individual governments.
This is actually a particularly important point. The nature of the EU is laden with bureaucracy. Combined with the wide range of cultures, and the rotation of staff, it makes bribing enough people to get your way difficult. You end up needing people in multiple countries to deal with it, and the rotations make long term deals difficult.
The end result is that bribing EU bureaucracy is like trying to stop a river with just hands. It's far less effective, letting the EU be a lot more effective (if slow).
There's a reason so many big business interests want to break up the EU.
Shouldn't it be the same in the US with state and federal governments?
All of the states are owned by one of the same two political parties, and their respective goals are more or less aligned on a state-by-state level, bordering on zealotry.
America is, effectively a monoculture. At least in the UK, there is more variance in accents over 100 miles than over all of the US. The EU has a wide selection of languages and cultures, all with deep histories and quirks. Methods that work in 1 culture will be insulting in another. America is practically setup for mass deployment of propaganda and industrial
bribery, sorry lobbying.The US was originally more like the EU but it federalized pretty hard after the civil war.
Brazil also has a similar law called LGPD, I think it was made based on European GDPR
Actually, and I'm quite proud of this, the LGPD was already being discussed before the EU's GDPR. It may not look like it, but Brazil is at the forefront of digital protection and privacy.
Yah, I just get Google to block these sites from ever being recommended again.
Is
briberypolitical donations not a thing in Europe?Because they can't do whatever they want here
I want more predatory websites to do this so that I can avoid them.
Anyone out of the EU can VPN to an EU country and benefit.
Some idiots keep using one of my email adresses for god knows what, ending up in me receiving newsletters and shit. Since actual user accounts are associated, I typically recover the password (since its my email adress) and then delete the account.
There are a few websites with similar restrictions though. They are completely fine sending shit to email adresses they never bothered to verify, but reject logins from countries (or even US states!) that they don't want. Morons.
that's when you report as spam. that shit hurts their trust rating and makes their emails more likely to end up in people's spam folders, pretty much killing their newsletter
Or auto forward it to their customer service email, or company email.
You only tell them your email is active with that.
Oh boy, that is a great idea. Every time they email me their shitty newsletter I get to create a new support ticket telling them I don't want it. Auto forward seems so nice.
You forward it to them and add that you want to exercise your rights to be forgotten.
Also report to the regulator in your jurisdiction (I believe FTC in the US) because sending unsolicited emails that the user cannot unsubscribe from is illegal in most places.
This is fine imo. If you don’t want to comply, don’t. You just don’t get to extract EU data
Right, at least they are honest about it and - in a way- comply with GDPR by avoiding it.
Yes, but it shows how they behave toward people who aren't in the EU.
Well, that's one way to comply
Perfect. Would be nice if US implemented the same regulations
Personal data is an enormous market in the US. Too many big players located here. It'd never happen unfortunately. We'd need to replace all of Congress with folks who actually care about rights and people instead of money. We have only a handful on the left and that's only in the house, and that's being generous. I haven't seen any attempts really on the right. So it'd be a long time until this is even remotely possible. I'd be amazed to see a senator actually care about people though. Or even a governor.
Don't forget the centrists, who want a happy medium between you being a product for someone else's money, and having privacy. Because, you know, a lack of privacy is totally cool or something...
Sadly, I live in the U.S., so if I went to this website, it would definitely take my data and sell it.
We don't get a GDPR to protect us. Be glad you do.
Proxy using an EU based server. Not like websites are going to actually check that you live there.
If you use a EU proxy for the site in OPs screenshot you would presumably just get the same message.
No thanks, I like fast internet.
I mean, honestly, you'd have to already have poor Internet to not be able to max out most connections regardless. It's the lag that is affected and it's likely still under a second.
I don't know, I used to use a VPN to France (not the same server each time) when I was downloading torrents, and when I forgot to turn it off, uploads for work were glacial. High upload speed is really necessary for my work because I regularly upload files which are half a gigabyte or more and need to get that done as quickly as possible. Now I VPN to Canada and I don't really have that problem anymore.
Uploads would likely be a lot more affected as your connection is very lopsided. I should have been more specific that down is a lot more difficult to max out. And uploads are more affected by your connection speed. So yeah, uploads you may see a difference. Depending on what you're torrenting though, VPN is likely safer for that to begin with.
A torrent client may need settings in the client changed, firewall rules changed, and ports open on the router. Even with all that a VPN could still have a limited connection. Some VPNs allow you control over this but I doubt free ones do
Things are changing rapidly but asynchronous upload/download speeds are not always offered by ISPs and uploading was always slower than downloading... used to be never but I've seen more and more ISPs offer asynchronous speeds
There are a huge number of factors that we don't know that could account for your slower speeds
Fair enough, I'm not an expert. I just know what I experienced when I used the VPN (PrivateInternetAccess FWIW). I didn't change any settings on it.
Upload speeds will be a lot slower than downloads speeds because VPNs are optimised for downloading. That's one you mate.
Ok, how was I supposed to know that exactly?
Eh? You are giving VPNs a bad review without knowing how to use them effectively. There is nothing wrong with not knowing something only with assuming.
Considering I use my VPN almost every day, how am I giving them a bad review? I even said I didn't have this problem when I connected to Canada.
Why do you need a GDPR to protect you? If you don't want tracking cookies then don't let web sites write them to your computer. You are in charge of your computer.
Wish it was that simple. The problem with the internet, as a whole, is someone figured out they can collect just about everything from your data, with or without cookies, and sell it to big companies.
Everything is about that almighty dollar. We are now the product under the guise of being a consumer.
You want to complain about access being blocked because of where you live, fine just makes you an easy commodity to sell to someone else.
Tbf, you want complete anonymity, stay off the web, don’t use bank accounts or credit cards, not even those like cash app, become a hermit and tell everyone to fuck off as you are not for sale.
In reality, it’s policies, like the GDPR, that are actually looking out for your best interest. Here in America the arguement would be “they’re taking away my freedom” or “the government is overreaching” instead of “Hey, someone actually cares about my privacy in the government!”
Like I have said in another group, people complain about their privacy online and then use the likes of chrome for their browser. We say we care about our privacy, but in the end we are a tool that doesn’t do the job we need done.
The thing is, if someone makes observations about you, and save that in the form of data, that's not your data. It's their data. It might be about you, but people are allowed to observe and sell their observations.
This is true. However, they need to inform you that they are collecting this data, what data they are collecting, and why, and give you the option to opt out of that data collection.
Just because they can doesn’t give them the right to do so without your explicit permission.
Why? I'm allowed to stand at a street corner and watch people walk by. I'm allowed to count them, and observe the direction they're going. I don't need any of their permission to do this. I'm allowed to know who they are, and I'm allowed to tell anyone I want what I saw. I'm allowed to charge money for it, and none of the people I observe are a party to this at all, so why should I need to either not do this, or tell them what I'm doing or ask for their permission to remember what I saw? How is internet tracking different?
Because they use personally identifying I for other than what you saw. In your comment does that mean you have a right to follow their personal life and invade it then sell it to others? No!
Your problem is you like being a commodity rather than just a consumer. You don’t mind your life being intruded on which could include cc numbers or bank account info. You want to lose your money like that that’s fine. Me personally, they can get out of my life and quit following what I want to do just to make a quick buck. Fuck that, me and my personal information is not for sale! And if anyone seems to think it is, I will stop them as that is my right.
Personally I think all tracking cookies should be banned on the internet worldwide! I am not a commodity.
I think there's a difference here where there's a reasonable expectation of privacy, and where there is not. Out on the sidewalk, you don't have one. Selling someone's CC is a violation of contract law because you do have an expectation of privacy there. So, we have to be very clear, what kind of data are we talking about? "Sharon Thomas visited this site, looked at these items, spent 14.2 seconds looking at that item, then clicked on this link," I think, is not something you can expect privacy from.
However, there are some things I do think you have an expectation of privacy from, which is the collation and sale of personal information that the customer enters into the site for the purposes of business with that site, like the collation names with addresses, driver's license numbers, social security numbers (or whatever local equivalents), etc. Another thing is that, and I don't know if I'm 100% right here, but I believe that when you visit a site, even by typing an address into the address bar, the site you're visiting is told, by your browser, what site you're coming from. That doesn't make sense to me, and that's not a thing that should exist.
Nonetheless, I don't think the GDPR is a good fit for addressing any of these issues.
Cookies aren't nearly the only form of tracking.
EU for the win.
Well, this is what you wanted isn't it? Your government is protecting you, anyone who can't comply can't serve you.
I read that as you being facetious, but: Yes this is exactly what I want. If a service can not comply with GDPR, the service should not be accessible. It would be great for their customers if the service decided to change their practices to become compliant, but that is a business decision they need to make.
Adding to that: Compliance is not even that hard to implement. I build almost all of my websites with GDPR compliance in mind and it's not really a big deal. There are easy to use tools like Cookie Consent and some of the sites don't even need a banner at all if they have no tracking (which you know, is completely possible too).
Cookie consent is the tip of the iceberg for GDPR compliance. If you're not collecting any user data for any reason, such as account creation, then you're probably ok with cookie consent, but GDPR is non trivial to comply with for companies collecting personal data.
Well I'm only being facetious insomuch as the OP is annoyed at a perfectly predictable outcome of laws that Europeans wanted. I'm very critical of the GDPR, I do want laws that prevent data harvesting but I just don't think the GDPR was the right approach.
Not "can't comply" but "doesn't want to comply". Other than that fully agreed, it is what I wanted.
Oh no! What will I do now without the prescient geopolitical insight of the Chattanooga Evening Telegraph?
The OP is irritated for some reason, I guess they really wanted that insight.
No, I just don't want sites like this to appear in my search results.
That's not true. If the company isn't doing business in the EU, they don't need to comply with the GDPR. What I mean is, they're entirely outside the jurisdiction of the EU and are not required to comply with any EU law. If the EU decides they want to force a non-EU company to comply, they have no ability to do so.
Serving ads to Europeans is doing business in the EU, and the US and EU have reciprocal civil enforcement mechanisms.
It's for the greater good, but it's also somewhat against the intention of the law, IMO.
Dataprotection is meant to give users control of their data. A restriction like that takes away a bit of my control, however, since it prevents me from doing whatever the fuck I want with my data.
But again: greater good. It also protects people who don't know what they are doing.
wtf is a byju... looks it up.. ok, interesting.
So? What is it?
It's a highly controversial tech company into online education in India. Controversial because they were a highly valued but hugely loss making company and then they apparently fudged their financials, Deloitte quit as their auditor, they underpaid and laid off 1000s of employees/educators, and cheated customers/parents into buying expensive bundles through super aggressive marketing where not so savvy customers were "bullied" into making purchases that are hard to unsubscribe
For example -
https://frontline.thehindu.com/news/investigation-byjus-staff-reveal-harsh-work-conditions-indian-parents-say-edtech-giant-pushed-them-into-debt/article66274546.ece
Yikes. Thank you for the update.
Wikipedia Link
Looks like its a educational learning app.
I literally linked to it!
Doesn't help much if you live in the EU because the reason this post exists.
I think they want to know if it is safe to click at work. Which seems like it is but the wiki link is more helpful.
I wish more invasive websites would do this.
Trust me, you don't want to visit that website (company).Its sales and marketing methods are scam at best.
Shows how broken the internet was and still is, basically the homeland of the internet is incapable of building pages that comply with basic regulation.
Incapable is not the same as refuses to.
I got to agree. Maybe they just don't understand or agree to what compliance involves. Company could be busy making widgets and not want to risk lawsuits from a region they don't directly do business with anyway.
Nah. It's because they want to sell data. It's super easy to comply unless you collect data from visitors. And you literally just have to say "if you click no, then we won't collect data". Some sites go out of their way to actually force you to opt out of every single cookie.
I need to know what this website is, so that I never use it.
Byju, it is an educational group known for its exploitative practices in selling over priced study materials for primary and secondary education in India and also for competitive exams.
It's actually in the screenshot. Kind of hidden though.
Here you go!
https://startuptoenterprise.com/india/8-ways-byjus-learning-app-is-an-abacus-of-exploitation/
Just another lazy American company not wanting to protect user data and using GPDR as an excuse.
Sure it takes work to treat user data properly but from a consumer perspective it is the right thing to do. Throwing shade at Europe because you don't want to do it doesn't seem the most productive thing to do.
This company is headquartered in Bangalore.
Still lazy! ;)
Translation: We are not allowing you to use our services in the EU due to better data privacy laws than the US.
🤷♂️ use another service if the nanny state controls your pipes.
Get a VPN.
Nah, I don't want to visit a site that publicly admits to invasive tracking.
Remember, you voted for this
I mean, I'm happy that the law is working.
Then why are you complaining about it?
Because they're so committed to stealing and selling your data, that they would rather not serve you at all if they can't get it. That's a fault of the site, not the law.
Fix your governance and get rid of the GDPR, and the problem will be solved.
"The solution is to just give up your rights to privacy, doy!"
You don't have to give up your rights to privacy to get rid of the GDPR. The GDPR isn't the reason you have any rights to privacy, nor does it actually effect any. What it effects is an entitlement to be forgotten and to move in anonymity when your identity is clearly observable and memorable. It's an overreach, and some people don't feel like dealing with it.