Running a service that might serve an EU citizen quickly escalates to involving lawyers and performing risk analysis in relation to being sued in a court across the ocean.
Running any service where you are not sure of legal requirements might require consulting a lawyer first, how is it unique to GDPR? And in order to be on the radar for GDPR violations as a small business you REALLY need to do something seriously wrong.
I've always believed GDPR was a regulation that crossed borders. Meaning it applies to any EU citizen, no matter where they are located, which is what made this unique (being that it's not my countries laws). But:
> The GDPR applies to: > > a company established outside the EU and is offering goods/services (paid or for free) or is monitoring the behaviour of individuals in the EU.
from https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
So now I'm wondering if an IP address reverse-geo lookup to block IPs in the EU is the easy way out for many online services, presuming that this doesn't cause compliance issues for EU users using a VPN.
"Processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that at least one of the following applies: [..] processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data"
Reasonable abuse protection clearly falls under that, as has been fairly clearly stated even in the GDPR itself: https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-49/
How long can the IP kept around for? And in what form? If it lands in a database, does it need to be encrypted at rest? Can it just be hashed? Salted, too? Do I need to rotate the salt? This limits the ability to protect the service though. Are the tools in my stack logging something somewhere else I don't know about? Could I get in trouble if it is? Cloudflare forwards IP-derived data to me, like the city of IP may be in, do I have to be concerned with that as well? Do I have to tell users upfront that I use Cloudflare and it derives data? I'm guessing I have to fully understand what CLoudflare does with this data. It eventually hits my Digital Ocean droplet, what does it log?, are there separate logs I can access from them outside my droplet? Certainly they have logs, too, what do I do about that? If I just require all users to explicitly agree to some form of data collection this probably goes away. Oh wait, now I have to manage obvious PII and ensure Right to be Forgotten can be exercised in a timely fashion, I've just made the whole thing more difficult for myself.
There is a cost, and it affect the small honest devs the most.
I'm not saying what GDPR is attempting to do is a bad thing, I'm just saying that it is not easy to comply like everyone keeps saying.
You have to be sure that you or anyone else in your chain can't link an IP to a specific person without explicit consent (and thus compliant with the rest of the regulation).
You can have cloudflare giving you IP/location pairs as long as cloudflare doesn't know who that person is.
You can keep your own logs of IP/person. You have to keep it safe, and inform somewhere in a policy that you are doing that. If the logs are kept abroad or cloud, then you need consent (and comply with the rest of the regulation).
It's all made to avoid companies tracking using across boundaries, selling data and having all that PII unwarranted for the next "We take your data and security very seriously" blog post about a leak.
It's easier not to keep any PII around. IPs? you can have as many as you want as long it can't be used to identify a person (without consent).
PS: here is a checklist => https://gdpr.eu/checklist/