Frightening to think something as innoculus as making a website of chocolate chip recipes and logging visitor IPs could provoke that.

Your chocolate chip recipe website will have to be compliant to a number of laws, GDPR isn't the only law in the internet.

It wouldn't, that's just pure FUD.

Tip: don’t log the IPs then.

I spin up a Wordpress site with default options to host my chocolate chip recipes. Is it GDPR compliant?

I go through and toggle all the settings the internet tells me to, even though I don't know their meaning or effect. Am I GDPR compliant?

I install a Wordpress plugin that sets up a Really Simple Chocolate Chip Syndication server, or RSCCS. That plugin logs IPs. If I was GDPR compliant previously, now I'm not, and how would I ever know?

If you don't know what you're doing, don't involve others.

Since I don't quite get the point you're making here, I think I should specify that I was playing the role of someone who wants to start up a website on the side but isn't an expert on computers, networking, software development, or international privacy law.

I know plenty of people with a get rich quick scheme to sell widgets, but who don't know the difference between WordPress and Microsoft Word.

Expecting them to know that starting a website with a plug and play webserver could collect sensitive information on their behalf is pushing it a bit. Expecting them to know they have to comply with a law passed by a governing body they've never come within 1k miles of...

> I was playing the role of someone who wants to start up a website on the side but isn't an expert on computers, networking, software development, or international privacy law.

If you're not an expert, you have to get one. Same reason why you cannot just go and plan a non-trivial building by yourself when you're not a architect or civil engineer.

> > I was playing the role of someone who wants to start up a website on the side but isn't an expert on computers, networking, software development, or international privacy law. > If you're not an expert, you have to get one. Same reason why you cannot just go and plan a non-trivial building by yourself when you're not a architect or civil engineer.

This attitude is really sad to me. It was and is one of the greatest things about the internet, that pretty much anyone anywhere could publish something. If you now need an "expert" to do that, we've lost something.

Unfortunately, copy/pasting a formatted comment on HN doesn't have enough newlines to quote the post properly.

Anywhere you want one newline in your output, you have to use two.

While I agree, if you're an American setting up a plug-and-play site with chocolate chip cookie recipes, that happens to collect data out of the box, where along the process are you going to realize that you even need to know anything about EU regulations?

I've never hired a Wumbologist because I don't know what Wumbology is or where it applies.

Which is relatively easy when you’ve written the software stack powering the recipe site, or can at least grok its source (if available). It may not A) be clear to the operator of a recipe site that their stack is logging IPs and B) be reasonably straightforward for the owner of a recipe site to stop their software from doing so.

Some things are very deliberate, but others are the consequence of decisions far removed from those of site operators.

That's a very unlikely "solution" and is not going to happen unless the EU wants retribution in some form from the rest of the world.

As mentioned, this is the retribution. The US has been enforcing their laws on the rest of the world with equally radical methods for many years already.