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The US approach to privacy is "let the market sort it out". It has sorted it out by transforming the internet into a giant spying machine sucking up contacts, p

by blub 10y ago

The US approach to privacy is "let the market sort it out". It has sorted it out by transforming the internet into a giant spying machine sucking up contacts, photos, documents, videos, metadata, what packages you use, when where and how you exercise, everything The EU approach to privacy (eroded by lobbying and lack of control over US companies) is that citizens have a right over their information. They can ask what personal information a company has on them, ask that it be corrected or deleted. This has resulted in companies that are more careful with data. Whenever I read a post like yours I immediately think of so-called "useful innocents", to put it euphemistically [1]. Fighting for a non-goal of better open source through analytics (get real), corporate dominance and fewer rights for individuals. Companies don't need analytics to improve software. They certainly don't need analytics from Google, the leading spyware-as-a-service company in the world. I expect open source to become better through writing quality software, engaging with users and if need be doing some surveys or organsising other reach-out initiatives in the open. Not analytics turned on by default but it's-ok-cause-we-tell-you-we're-fucking-you. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

wfunction 10y ago
> The EU approach to privacy (eroded by lobyying and lack of control over US companies) is that citizens have a right over their information. They can ask what personal information a company has on them, ask that it be corrected or deleted. This has resulted in companies that are more careful with data. More like, this has resulted in things like nonsensical "Cookie warnings" that only waste the user's time.
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  Not entirely. I've learned to read the word "cookie" in many different languages.
- Semaphor 10y ago
  It has resulted in a lot of good things. Cookie consent is most certainly not one of them.
  - EvilTerran 10y ago
    IMO, the intent was good... but yeah, the implementation is a grand demonstration of what you get when legislators don't understand the technology they're regulating. It would be far better if they'd required browsers, not websites, to show the notifications - much like they already do when a site wants to access your webcam/mic/location/etc[0]. That would mean much less implementation work (once per browser instead of per site), no way for underhanded sites to use cookies without the user being notified or despite the user declining them, consistent UI across all sites... Such a thing could provide significantly more useful information, too - I envisage a notification with "This site wants to use a cookie on your computer" at the top, "allow/deny, now/always" buttons and a "What are cookies?" link at the bottom, and a user-friendly breakdown of this particular case in between, things like: • "only visible to this site" vs "visible to ad.doubleclick.net" etc - maybe including, say, the Organization Name from the cookie domain's SSL cert, at least in the case of cookies set to "Secure" (maybe only if the cert's EV) • "until you close your browser" vs "for a week" etc - perhaps with a way for the user to force session-only if desired • possibly some kind of warning about snooping risk if the cookie's not marked secure, or not HTTP-only & 3rd-party scripts are on the page, etc • for the case of 3rd-party cookies, it'd be possible to list which other sites have used the same cookie in the past And so forth. The most importantant point being that you could actually trust this information - your browser has no motivation to lie to you about it, but any random site might. [0] eg, https://i.imgur.com/NcxWz8zh.jpg https://i.imgur.com/NcxWz8zh.jpg
    - kuschku 10y ago
      The issue is: What about technical cookies? The law allows storing session info, config options, etc without prompting. The browser couldn’t reliably test that. Unless you’d also let login to sites be handled by the browser, akin to Mozilla’s Persona. Damn, that’d actually be a much nicer web.
      - EvilTerran 10y ago
        Yeah, that could work. Or, to look at it another way... so what if the browser pops up notifications more often than the law requires? Might encourage people to make less use of cookies for functionality that doesn't really need them, which would be no tragedy. And if your site really can't do without them, you could pop up a message explaining the situation & politely asking to be unblocked. I suppose there'd be a danger of alert fatigue... maybe some heuristic analysis of the cookies themselves would be in order, to at least tentatively classify them as "tracking" vs "other". Eg, Google Analytics & Piwik cookies could be identified pretty reliably.
- blub 10y ago
  That cookie warning is just a friendly reminder that you are being tracked everywhere. Of course, websites that don't track their users are exempt: http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm I guess the EU didn't expect websites to cling to tracking cookies like their lives depended on them.
  - Isinlor 10y ago
    Cookie law is one of the stupidest laws that EU forced. I had to install additional rules to adblocker to get rid of this nonsense and it still doesn't catch everything and keeps irritating me... I don't care, damn it! http://nocookielaw.com/ http://nocookielaw.com/
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Is it truly? The law is pretty simple: If you track users, or transmit information to third parties which could track the user, you have to get the user to opt-in. The original intention was to get rid of Facebook’s shadow profiles, which it did – in the EU, websites don’t embed Facebook’s like button anymore, but have a two-click solution, where you have to click it, then it’s actually loaded, then you can like. That alone is worth such a law.
      - Isinlor 10y ago
        It is not worth it. I would really want a good way to protect myself as an Internet user from this law that the EU is enforcing on me. To protect myself not from Facebook, not from Google, but from the EU. It also gets in my way as a web developer. The law is not simple. 100 words sentences of law jargon are not simple. Many, many pages of such sentences is the opposite of simple. To be honest I have never really understood the law and I don't think I ever will. Even keeping track of it is far from simple. But according to this website: http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm Cookies clearly exempt from consent according to the EU advisory body on data protection- WP29pdf include: (...) third‑party social plug‑in content‑sharing cookies, for logged‑in members of a social network. So, I think what you say about Facebook is not true.
- codedokode 10y ago
  Cookie warnings are an indicator showing that a website takes part in a global spying network. But I think instead of warnings browser developers should just disable third-party cookies by default. Sadly, the most popular browser developer by conicidence owns a popular tracking service so that is not going to happen.
  - lewiseason 10y ago
    > global spying network Or maybe they want to persist session information? Maybe browsers should prompt, instead of each website, but it's too late for that now.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      > Or maybe they want to persist session information? That’s specifically exempt from the cookie law: Any technical cookie – session information, config options, etc – is allowed without any request. The Cookie law only requires opt-in for tracking. Such as Google Analytics.
      - lewiseason 10y ago
        Yeah, good point. I couldn't recall if it was third-party cookies, or if it were tracking cookies that the requirement stated.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
cm2187 10y ago
It's the combination of companies gathering ever more personal data and companies proving to be absolutely incapable to prevent leaking personal data that I find worrying even more than the direct spying.
pvinis 10y ago
Do you use brew? Have you contributed code to it? Have you installed something using brew, before updating brew for a while? For me, my answers are yes no yes. A while ago, you did that, and you get an old version of the thing you just installed. With analytics, they saw that many people forget to update before installing after a while, so they added an update step in that case. I call that progress, no matter how small. I didn't change that and to you didn't change that. The brew devs changed that. Maybe they would have changed it anyway later.. Who knows. But the fact that brew because a tiny tiny bit better because of analytics, in part from me, makes me a happier user. Now I don't need to remember to update before installing. Of course it's not the best way to "contribute", but it's something. Definitely better than "contributing" your data to companies, like you said.
- majewsky 10y ago
  I can totally see the benefits of telemetry. But it would be way less phishy if it were opt-in, or at least opt-out with a very visible information message.
  - codedokode 10y ago
    Opt-out is what commecrial companies do because they do not respect their users' privacy. Free open source software should do the opposite. By the way I think that browser history should be disabled by default too.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Browser history is useful to user (but maybe the access to it could be restricted by means of authentication). I'm fine with off-line browser history that's accessible only to the user (and not JS running on a website). But sending any of it over the wire should definitely be opt-in.
      - codedokode 10y ago
        An unexperienced user might not know that the history is recorded and later can be accidently seen for example by other member of the family. A good software would not allow that. I remember some IM app for linux had history turned off by default. I was really surprised then.
dbg31415 10y ago
> Companies don't need analytics to improve software. I was with you except this line. Data is needed to make better choices and prioritize improvements. How would you like people to collect data? Google Analytics is free, easy, and powerful. Adding the cost of buioding a KPI tracking and reporting later from scratch... simply would be too much for most open source projects.
- kuschku 10y ago
  Do market studies? Take a dozen, or two dozen, users and give them your product, let them use it, and get far more results from that? You can even do these things for free, especially in open source many of your potential users are willing to do this.
vsl 10y ago
The EU approach of “let’s regulate everything and let incompetent out of touch bureaucrats write the legislation” left to annoying (much more than ads for me) cookie banners and other such nonsense. Starting next year, cookies — i.e. often random nonsense numbers — will have to be treated as personal data in EU. I envy US.

by blub 10y ago

wfunction 10y ago

> The EU approach to privacy (eroded by lobyying and lack of control over US companies) is that citizens have a right over their information. They can ask what personal information a company has on them, ask that it be corrected or deleted. This has resulted in companies that are more careful with data. More like, this has resulted in things like nonsensical "Cookie warnings" that only waste the user's time.

DonHopkins 10y ago
Not entirely. I've learned to read the word "cookie" in many different languages.
Semaphor 10y ago
It has resulted in a lot of good things. Cookie consent is most certainly not one of them.
- EvilTerran 10y ago
  IMO, the intent was good... but yeah, the implementation is a grand demonstration of what you get when legislators don't understand the technology they're regulating. It would be far better if they'd required browsers, not websites, to show the notifications - much like they already do when a site wants to access your webcam/mic/location/etc[0]. That would mean much less implementation work (once per browser instead of per site), no way for underhanded sites to use cookies without the user being notified or despite the user declining them, consistent UI across all sites... Such a thing could provide significantly more useful information, too - I envisage a notification with "This site wants to use a cookie on your computer" at the top, "allow/deny, now/always" buttons and a "What are cookies?" link at the bottom, and a user-friendly breakdown of this particular case in between, things like: • "only visible to this site" vs "visible to ad.doubleclick.net" etc - maybe including, say, the Organization Name from the cookie domain's SSL cert, at least in the case of cookies set to "Secure" (maybe only if the cert's EV) • "until you close your browser" vs "for a week" etc - perhaps with a way for the user to force session-only if desired • possibly some kind of warning about snooping risk if the cookie's not marked secure, or not HTTP-only & 3rd-party scripts are on the page, etc • for the case of 3rd-party cookies, it'd be possible to list which other sites have used the same cookie in the past And so forth. The most importantant point being that you could actually trust this information - your browser has no motivation to lie to you about it, but any random site might. [0] eg, https://i.imgur.com/NcxWz8zh.jpg https://i.imgur.com/NcxWz8zh.jpg
  - kuschku 10y ago
    The issue is: What about technical cookies? The law allows storing session info, config options, etc without prompting. The browser couldn’t reliably test that. Unless you’d also let login to sites be handled by the browser, akin to Mozilla’s Persona. Damn, that’d actually be a much nicer web.
    - EvilTerran 10y ago
      Yeah, that could work. Or, to look at it another way... so what if the browser pops up notifications more often than the law requires? Might encourage people to make less use of cookies for functionality that doesn't really need them, which would be no tragedy. And if your site really can't do without them, you could pop up a message explaining the situation & politely asking to be unblocked. I suppose there'd be a danger of alert fatigue... maybe some heuristic analysis of the cookies themselves would be in order, to at least tentatively classify them as "tracking" vs "other". Eg, Google Analytics & Piwik cookies could be identified pretty reliably.
blub 10y ago
That cookie warning is just a friendly reminder that you are being tracked everywhere. Of course, websites that don't track their users are exempt: http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm I guess the EU didn't expect websites to cling to tracking cookies like their lives depended on them.
- Isinlor 10y ago
  Cookie law is one of the stupidest laws that EU forced. I had to install additional rules to adblocker to get rid of this nonsense and it still doesn't catch everything and keeps irritating me... I don't care, damn it! http://nocookielaw.com/ http://nocookielaw.com/
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Is it truly? The law is pretty simple: If you track users, or transmit information to third parties which could track the user, you have to get the user to opt-in. The original intention was to get rid of Facebook’s shadow profiles, which it did – in the EU, websites don’t embed Facebook’s like button anymore, but have a two-click solution, where you have to click it, then it’s actually loaded, then you can like. That alone is worth such a law.
    - Isinlor 10y ago
      It is not worth it. I would really want a good way to protect myself as an Internet user from this law that the EU is enforcing on me. To protect myself not from Facebook, not from Google, but from the EU. It also gets in my way as a web developer. The law is not simple. 100 words sentences of law jargon are not simple. Many, many pages of such sentences is the opposite of simple. To be honest I have never really understood the law and I don't think I ever will. Even keeping track of it is far from simple. But according to this website: http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm Cookies clearly exempt from consent according to the EU advisory body on data protection- WP29pdf include: (...) third‑party social plug‑in content‑sharing cookies, for logged‑in members of a social network. So, I think what you say about Facebook is not true.
codedokode 10y ago
Cookie warnings are an indicator showing that a website takes part in a global spying network. But I think instead of warnings browser developers should just disable third-party cookies by default. Sadly, the most popular browser developer by conicidence owns a popular tracking service so that is not going to happen.
- lewiseason 10y ago
  > global spying network Or maybe they want to persist session information? Maybe browsers should prompt, instead of each website, but it's too late for that now.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    > Or maybe they want to persist session information? That’s specifically exempt from the cookie law: Any technical cookie – session information, config options, etc – is allowed without any request. The Cookie law only requires opt-in for tracking. Such as Google Analytics.
    - lewiseason 10y ago
      Yeah, good point. I couldn't recall if it was third-party cookies, or if it were tracking cookies that the requirement stated.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

cm2187 10y ago

It's the combination of companies gathering ever more personal data and companies proving to be absolutely incapable to prevent leaking personal data that I find worrying even more than the direct spying.

pvinis 10y ago

Do you use brew? Have you contributed code to it? Have you installed something using brew, before updating brew for a while? For me, my answers are yes no yes. A while ago, you did that, and you get an old version of the thing you just installed. With analytics, they saw that many people forget to update before installing after a while, so they added an update step in that case. I call that progress, no matter how small. I didn't change that and to you didn't change that. The brew devs changed that. Maybe they would have changed it anyway later.. Who knows. But the fact that brew because a tiny tiny bit better because of analytics, in part from me, makes me a happier user. Now I don't need to remember to update before installing. Of course it's not the best way to "contribute", but it's something. Definitely better than "contributing" your data to companies, like you said.

majewsky 10y ago
I can totally see the benefits of telemetry. But it would be way less phishy if it were opt-in, or at least opt-out with a very visible information message.
- codedokode 10y ago
  Opt-out is what commecrial companies do because they do not respect their users' privacy. Free open source software should do the opposite. By the way I think that browser history should be disabled by default too.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Browser history is useful to user (but maybe the access to it could be restricted by means of authentication). I'm fine with off-line browser history that's accessible only to the user (and not JS running on a website). But sending any of it over the wire should definitely be opt-in.
    - codedokode 10y ago
      An unexperienced user might not know that the history is recorded and later can be accidently seen for example by other member of the family. A good software would not allow that. I remember some IM app for linux had history turned off by default. I was really surprised then.

dbg31415 10y ago

> Companies don't need analytics to improve software. I was with you except this line. Data is needed to make better choices and prioritize improvements. How would you like people to collect data? Google Analytics is free, easy, and powerful. Adding the cost of buioding a KPI tracking and reporting later from scratch... simply would be too much for most open source projects.

kuschku 10y ago
Do market studies? Take a dozen, or two dozen, users and give them your product, let them use it, and get far more results from that? You can even do these things for free, especially in open source many of your potential users are willing to do this.

vsl 10y ago

The EU approach of “let’s regulate everything and let incompetent out of touch bureaucrats write the legislation” left to annoying (much more than ads for me) cookie banners and other such nonsense. Starting next year, cookies — i.e. often random nonsense numbers — will have to be treated as personal data in EU. I envy US.