The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine. I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely freedom to do whatever I wanted with it.

That's what I want the Internet to look like for my younger family and friends. It'll probably never happen exactly this way, but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their phone to impress their friends. I know what their smile would look like because that was once my smile, too.

How can a small website cope with GDPR compliance though? The rules that sprang up to constrain the social-media behemoths seem onerous for anyone but them to comply with.

By not collecting data it has no need for, and not passing that data on to third parties? By providing an ability to delete any user account, and for editing any personal information? By not using EBCDIC to store said information?

Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?

> Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?

I'm not sure. I guess if one trusts the default logging settings on the server software to be compliant, and only uses static HTML, maybe that's adequate? But as soon as any third-party code or data provided by some other server gets involved, it's hard to know what might be logged elsewhere as a result of visiting your site.

I mean, would an old-fashioned web visitor counter be compliant? It's tracking something in order to provide that number.

You can +1 a database `views` column without storing anything at all about the user. If you’re just doing that you’re good to go

I mean, most "unique view counters" store the users IP address, so that would be right out. I'm fairly sure even being aware of what complying with a complex legal documents implies constitutes enough of a complication that it's worth mentioning.

It is a complication, but I believe it's worded so that small companies and individuals are immune from its consequences.

You could always hash the IP on the client side before sending it to your counter. That way you have no information which you can backtrack to a specific IP and therefore a person.

Except there's so few IPs (v4) you could just bruteforce it in not too much time.