[In Omnibus]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

There is no way your forum database can identify anyone using the site as a guest by their IP address alone. In many cases, it cannot even identify the person's location let alone any thing else about the person - it is more likely to identify the head office of the ISP. Sometimes my IP address gets the city right but it is just as likely to show me as their head office in another city 450 kms away.

If you are really concerned about it, don't let Guests post. That's a whole lot better for spam prevention anyway.

I'm not arguing whether or not an IP address or a cookie can be used by a site to identify a data subject. The EU thinks it can and they ruled as such. Having said that I decided to ban EU / EEU users rather than deal with this ridiculous nonsense. I'm not going to play footsie with the EU regulator because, as primarily a U.S. business servicing primarily U.S. clients I have that luxury. I feel badly for E.U. based businesses that are forced to tiptoe around such rulings at the risk of exorbitant fines.