The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a currently widely debated topic as it has come into effect on May 25, 2018. Its aim is to improve the protection of users’ privacy in the European Union – a worthwhile goal that we certainly support as provider of a privacy service. However, the regulation also has its downside: Censorship. EU citizens are now somewhat deprived of their freedom of choice: Some companies are starting to discontinue their services in the EU in order to avoid having to deal with the complex GDPR rules and their consequences.
It should not come as a big surprise that there is already a JavaScript-based solution for website maintainers that will exclude EU citizens form accessing their services and content. This is called the “GDPR Shield”.
Certainly, this can be seen as an advantage for EU citizens: Nobody will miss companies like drawbridge whose entire business model is to track users across all devices to show them tailored advertisements.
But there are also many companies that provide a service EU citizens benefit from. Whether online gaming or educational websites, many companies are too small or simply cannot afford to deal with the consequences of GDPR and might be forced to withdraw from the EU market. This of course is a problem because it means that users in the EU will not be able to have access to all content.
For Perfect Privacy users this is no problem because it is simple to circumvent GDPR geoblocking by using a VPN server outside the EU. And while doing so you still don’t need to worry about all your data being used for tracking and marketing as you are using anonymized connections and IP addresses and you can activate features like TrackStop to prevent tracking and ads.
But users without the ability to switch their IP to a location of their choosing are left empty-handed. Of course, everyone should be protective of their data and choose carefully who to trust, but the key word is choice: The decision should be the users’ and not be forced by regulation.
On the plus side, services like Perfect Privacy allow users to keep their freedom of choice while they are protected against unwanted tracking and ads at the same time.