Chat with us on Discord

The forum has turned into the perfect place for your support requests and questions. With its topic-base architecture, all the answers and solutions stay around and can be searched easily – even months or years from now.

But it’s not really made for real-time communication – a place to just hang out and chat about all kinds of topics around Kirby. That’s why we started a Discord server today in addition to the forum. Come join us over there if you need a place to simply chat: https://chat.getkirby.com

In this context I have a question about data protection:

According to c’t: Was das Ende des Privacy Shield für den Datenverkehr mit den USA bedeutet, is the use of such a service of a US company for a German company permissible in accordance with the “Datenschutz-Grundverordnung” (DSGVO), the German version of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?

What is your problem? Is anyone forcing you to join? No.

Yes, to publish my contributions there, I need an account there.
Otherwise I am excluded from full cooperation.

Or look here:

But I have patience until “Bastian Allgeier GmbH” publishes the answer of her data protection officer here…

These are offers for members of the community who are interested in them. If you aren’t interested in them(e.g. due to concerns about your personal data privacy), that is fine. We respect that.

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I ask, because I am a

Heiner, what could they possibly do with your IP Adress and the Nickname you enter? Just from a practical standpoint. What could they possibly do? If they would have nefarious goals, what could they do with that information?

I must give them my “email address” which is not allowed to give it companies in the USA according to my further education on the “Datenschutz-Grundverordnung” (DSGVO) in the company where I work and where I am regularly trained on this topic. Because also email addresses are subject of the protection of the DSGVO.
Every company in the EU must comply with this EU law, whether the company wants to or not!

Ignorance does not protect from punishment here! That could become really expensive…

Then don’t use it. Please don’t use it.

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I think there’s a misunderstanding: If you send your data to a company without them asking you to do it, they aren’t obligated to handle them with respect towards GDPR. Of course they have to take care of the GDPR and a violation might result in a fine but that’s irrelevant for the question wether you are allowed to use it. According to my knowledge there’s no punishment intended by the GDPR for using a service which doesn’t comply with the GDPR to 100 %. It’s only a matter for the business itself.

Actually there are even legal discussions if the GDPR takes care of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union with respect that an indiviual must be able to agree to non-lawful data processing with respect of enabling worldwide social communication as a human right, e. g. being able to stay friends with people in countries that are classified as non-GDPR-compliant due to their national laws.

Long story short: There’s no way to be punished for using it as an user nor does it matter much in theory as you can use a generated 10 minute trash mail plus VPN services. I know why you are unhappy about this and I do understand that point but right now, we shall have a somehow fair relation to the GDPR: You won’t find a 100 % compliant service and in many cases it doesn’t even matter as the GDPR is thought to be used as a protection against big data, monopols, abuse of highly confidential or risky data, etc. For a public forum with a very limited user scope it’s way too much effort to be compliant.

The web is a dangerous space. Data spies and fraud everywhere. It’s better to generally keep away. Back to the good old analog days. Let’s shut the forum down as well. And write letters instead.

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@texnixe:

As I said:

Heiner, please find a hobby, you clearly have too much time on your hands :roll_eyes:

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We are offering a free service that is 100% optional. You don’t have any negative side effects in Kirby by not joining Discord.

In this sense, Discord can be very much compared to our Twitter profile, our Instagram account or our Youtube channel. If you want to interact with us there, you have the exact same problem. You need an account and you need to hand them your email address, IP and probably even more. All that data is stored on US servers as well. That’s why, again, all of those services are free additional offerings that you don’t have to use in order to be able to fully enjoy Kirby.

You can go to the privacy pages of all those services, read them thourougly and then decide if you want to agree with their practices or not.

Maybe just ask yourself if it is legal according to the DSVGO that pretty much any German DAX company runs a Facebook page, an Instagram account, a LinkedIn profile and sometimes even Twitter.

From discussions with our own laywer, I can only assume, that half of the internet is based in a legal twilight zone and GDPR and DSVGO didn’t help at all to clear this up. I wish wholeheartedly that it was different. For a small company this is a nightmare.

We do everything to act responsibly and transparently for our own site and software and we explain it in detail here: https://getkirby.com/privacy For all third-party services (Twitter, Instagram, Discord, etc.) we can only leave the choice up to our community members if they want to use it or not. We don’t have any control over the personal data of their users. We don’t even see their email addresses.

But as much as social media is fundamentally flawed and broken, we cannot simply run a content management system in a highly competitive market without using any of those tools and platforms. Of course we chose Discord because of the network effect. Because it’s a highly popular chat platform, optimized to create vibrant communities. We don’t have privacy-focused alternatives for that, which are based in the EU and have a similiar success. The same goes for Youtube. Self-hosting our videos would be possible, but all of those tools and services also help with marketing and community-building. It’s a shame, but it’s reality. It’s a form of dependency that we truely hate.

We still follow our ethics for everything we create, how we communicate and what choices we leave up to our users.

But I would like to use this discussion for a different kind of topic. Speaking of rules: you decided to use this forum - which is also a 100% free and optional service - and you agreed to our community rules by signing up with your email address here. We warned you many times that the way you post comments here is not ok. It’s always aggressive to an extend that it feels threatening. I personally cannot tell if you posted these comments here in order to help or to threaten us. I gave you a fair warning some weeks ago after many many incidents that we just tolerated as a team. But I’m no longer ok with this form of communication and neither are the other members of the Kirby core team.

If you’d be truly concerned about our company being in danger, you would have sent us a personal message and discussed this in private.

By posting it so publicly and so aggressively it feels like a threat. I wouldn’t say this if this was the first time. It most definitely isn’t.

I no longer believe that you belong in this community and that you actually want to be a part of it. That’s why we decided as a team to ban your account for violating our community rules multiple times and after a very clear warning. You get the chance to reply before we ban the account tomorrow.

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