An important note on GDPR and cookie walls – CyberSEO Pro

You know that CyberSEO Pro is able to use the Full-Text RSS script by fivefilters.org to extract full text articles from the RSS feeds that contain short the plugin will generate titles only. The Full-Text RSS script is not included into the CyberSEO Pro bundle because it’s a 3rd-party product. However, it can be downloaded separately and used by CyberSEO Pro as a 3rd-party service to comply with GPL rules. Thus here is a very important quote from https://blog.fivefilters.org/2019/03/29/full-text-rss-395.html:

Because of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), some sites have put up cookie notices on their pages notifying you of their use of cookies and asking you to accept. Some sites go even further and put up cookie walls in front of all EU visitors. These are warnings displayed to visitors prompting them to accept tracking of some sort before they can start reading the content they want to read. Some sites go even further and flat out refuse to load content for EU visitors.

If you install Full-Text RSS on a server in an EU country, Full-Text RSS will also be treated as an EU visitor. Because Full-Text RSS acts as your proxy here and has no intention of tracking you or helping other sites track you, we have rules to pass through many cookie walls and give you the content you’re after. This approach works well, but is limited in that it requires knowledge of how a site has implemented its cookie wall. As such, you may still encounter sites that won’t work when Full-Text RSS is installed on an EU server.

So, as much as we think the GDPR is a good move, to make sure Full-Text RSS is able to work with the widest range of sites, our suggestion is to install Full-Text RSS on a server outside the EU, or to configure Full-Text RSS to use a non-EU proxy. We’ll be updating our hosting page with recommendations soon, as well as moving our hosted Full-Text RSS instances outside of the EU.

Even if you don’t use the Extract full articles option in CyberSEO Pro feed settings, you are still affected to the cookie walls. In this case I have the same recommendation: set up the CyberSEO Pro plugin on a server outside of the EU, or use a non-EU proxy. You can set it in the Proxy list box at CyberSEO Pro -> General Settings page (please find more info here).

Source: https://www.cyberseo.net/blog/an-important-note-on-gdpr-and-cookie-walls/


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