American websites improved due to European privacy laws

An interesting side-effect to the introduction of the GDPR, the latest EU privacy law, was that (for Europeans at least) several American websites improved.

Instead of a dazzling and confusing cornucopia of banners and clickables, the sites of USA Today and NPR refocused on their stated goal, i.e. journalism.

See here for two examples:

and

Would you not much rather read the European versions of these sites than the American ones?

The one site that seems confused is Google:

This seems like a link to an article in the LA Times about that same publication suing the city of Los Angeles, but if I click that link, I get a message saying “our website is currently unavailable in most European countries.”

The LA Times has chosen that rather than making a version of its website that does not heavily infringe upon the privacy of its visitors, it will simply show nothing to Europeans.

This is the same Google that for some bizarre reason wants to fine-tune every aspect of my ‘search experience’, to the point that my search results are never the same as anybody else’s results for the same search phrase. Yet they are unable to filter out websites that refuse to show me relevant content.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2018 at 1:20 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.