Individual sites—after consulting their own legal staff—can now request the block for traffic from the European Union (EU), European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland to be removed. This new incremental option may allow traffic from those areas to view TownNews sites while reducing the risk of non-compliance.
What do you need to do?
Note: if your site is soliciting traffic directly from the EU, EEA or Switzerland, or accepting currencies from these countries, the site is not eligible for removal of the GDPR block.
If you wish to continue blocking EU/EEA/Switzerland traffic, no further action is required. This is already on by default.
If you wish to provide EU/EEA/Switzerland users access to your site:
The Google panel:Â This panel has been updated to remove IP address tracking in order to be GDPR compliant. Additionally, we enabled the Google settings to anonymize user data during any analytics tracking. Contact us for more assistance.
Ensure the following are compliant with GDPR requirements:
Other third-party scripts or widgets
All advertising included on the site
Before removing the block, it is also strongly recommended that sites:
Seek legal advice for more information about the GDPR and compliance with the law.
Review any data held by your company, and understand the legal reasons for having and using the data.
Update Terms of Use to reflect personal data usage, storage and so forth. Language should also be included to specify whether or not the site is targeting the EU with content or advertising.
Examine advertising and third-parties used on the front-end of the site. Determine if they are compliant or will need to be blocked. Some scripts and widgets may need to be edited to be blocked when viewed from GDPR countries.
Establish a process to respond to individual users requesting their own data or users requesting to be "forgotten." In the future, TownNews plans to have an interface to perform these activities (for data held by TownNews) from within the User Dashboard. For now, if a site wants to unblock EEA/EU traffic, this will be a manual process.
Certain services, scripts and ads built-in to TownNews have been determined to be at risk for non-compliance and will continue to be blocked for EU/EEA/Switzerland traffic:
Advertising—DFP and BLOX Ad Manager. May be reactivated upon request
Paid Recommendations provided by TownNews
BLOX Subscription—Metering only
BLOX Comments, Disqus, Facebook Commenting, Livefyre, The World Table
Weather Radar Widget
Third party analytics: Comscore, Chartbeat, Quantcast
