By Andrea Fernandes From Guyana Guardian

Almost every website belonging to the Guyana Government, and even dozens of websites that are being operated by entities within the private sector, has been blocked by the UK and over twenty other European countries.

The countries decided to blacklist the locally operated websites citing the fact that the websites were violating the EU GDPR law.

Most of the government websites belonged to the various ministries, but other state-operated entities such as the Department of Public Information, the Guyana Chronicle, and the Office of the President, among several others, are now blacklisted in Europe.

For the private sector, the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce -GCCI led the way, while almost every news website except for the Guyana Guardian, have been blacklisted.

This means that millions of people in Europe, and several European overseas territories would have received a warning not to visit those websites, while others will be unable to do so, except via Facebook.

As a result the only news publication that people in Europe can currently access for information about Guyana is the Guyana Guardian.

Others can only access the other local sites using a VPN or other bypass services. In some instances, a handful of ISP’s are yet to effect blacklist, thus allowing a smaller number of people in Europe to still access the blacklisted local sites.

This was evident after this publication which usually receives an average of 8,000 to 10,000 visits per day from Europe, noticed that it has skyrocketed to an average of 25,000 to 30,000 visits a day from the EU region alone.

This may be so because the Guyana Guardian seems to be the only news website from Guyana that is fully compliant with the GDPR law, and is understandably the only one that people in the EU can read without receiving a warning.

The Guyana Guardian’s GDPR compliance was set up by Site Secure Online, which basic offers a number of other website security services free of charge to small companies and government agencies.

Site Secure Online has since offered to help the Guyana Government to make its websites GDPR compliant free of cost, in addition to getting them removed from the EU GDPR blacklist.

It has also decided to extend the services free of cost to all local news portals and private sector businesses in Guyana, and is considering whether to do so through the Georgetown Chamber of Industry and Commerce.

To access the free service, affected website owners can go to: www.sitesecure.online or email their domain name and their contact phone number to: [email protected]

For more on this story go to: https://www.guyanaguardian.com/guyana-government-websites-blocked-28-countries/