alt Hacker NewsWhy is this site blocked in the EU ? Was disabling cookies on your static page that hard ?
Replies
No one is going to go around complying with random rules from other countries, man. If you don't serve that population, just opt them out.
They are a hyper local business. The chance of making any revenue off EU users is close to 0, which is much higher than the cost of figuring out EU compliance.
The conversation went like this:
IT director: “If we serve ads or collect data from EU users we have to be GDPR compliant. That’ll cost several thousand dollars worth of employee time”
Exec: “how much revenue is attributable to EU users.”
IT: “Single digit dollars per year”
Exec: “is there a cheaper solution?”
This website is a small, local company. They have a newsletter signup page so they do collect user info. Quite likely they are not GDPR compliant (e.g. take longer than 30d to delete records, don't have a process for answering data requests etc). It is reasonable for them not to want to invest in getting the legal advise to know whether they are compliant or process improvements to become compliant, as there is no ROI on that.
I love GDPR, but it's understandable for folks with no connection to the EU to just nope-out.
This website and topic is protected by a SEP field. Who cares about U.S. problems?
You're not missing anything. Here is the full text: (this could have been an email:)
On Sept. 30, 2025, a Flock vice president logged into the Dunwoody PD’s Flock system and looked at a camera in the children’s gymnastics room of a private community center here in Dunwoody.
He did not look at any other cameras in the entire 400-camera network that day.
The community center shared their cameras directly to the PD under the pretense that access was “solely for real-time critical incident response.”
Flock and Dunwoody elected officials both say this was for a “sales demo.” They claim this was “part of authorized activity approved under the city's demo partner agreement.”
The problem with that is that the city cannot provide any information that that demo partner agreement exists.
What kind of sales demo would require looking at one camera in a children’s gymnastics room? Can anyone rationally explain why a police agency that is interested in Flock would like to see one third-party camera integration that is in a children’s gymnastics room?
Jason Hunyar lives in Dunwoody.