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So websites are supposed to just absorb the cost? That seems like a ridiculous stance.
by plopz 8y ago
So websites are supposed to just absorb the cost? That seems like a ridiculous stance.
- paulmd 8y agoNo, they're supposed to serve generic, non-tracking ads. Non-targeted, or whatever the terminology is. It's hilarious how everyone has just forgotten that used to be a thing. The people on this website are literally the problem, you can't even conceive of a website that doesn't track every click you make across the whole internet, and you guys are the people building the new web.
- deanalevitt 8y agoWhich is what DuckDuckGo does, I think.
- johnchristopher 8y agoI think it has more to do with an anti-authoritarianism attitude than anything else.
- woah 8y agoIt’s not possible to do a lot of normal web stuff without session cookies.
- kerng 8y agoThe concepts of a session cookie is different then a cookie used for advertisemnet that tracks you across the internet. The problem is tracking and ads, not authentication and authorization for functional purposes. Cookies are just one way to track people and serve ads, there are many others. Facebook is a great example on keeping diluting these concepts. They ask for your information for function security purposes and then go back and use that same data for ads - that is unethical and has to stop.
- darkarmani 8y agoDefine "a lot of normal web stuff". How did we ever do normal web stuff before session cookies?
- bigbadgoose 8y agoI think they would start another fire, and get another blanket
- cortesoft 8y agoI mean, we have had session cookies since the first version of netscape. Almost everything we think of as 'normal web stuff' is post cookies.
- wolco 8y agoWe telnetted into places.
- paxys 8y agoWe didn't
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- taneq 8y agoSession cookie in the URL?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- darpa_escapee 8y agoWhich is irrelevant, because session cookies don't need a warning. There is no reason to equivocate session cookies with tracking cookies.
- wsy 8y agoCookies are allowed, tracking users without consent is now illegal in EU (regardless which technology is used).
- paulmd 8y agoThe GDPR doesn't regard cookies that serve a bona-fide business purpose. You are free to use cookies to provide a shopping cart, or allow users to log in to an account at your store, or whatever. It's specifically tracking and advertising that is forbidden. If the user is not getting something out of it (besides the generic "access to my website") then presumptively don't do it. GDPR is literally as easy as that. GDPR understands full well that you need session cookies to provide a shopping cart or user account. That's why there's specific exemptions for it.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago"It's hilarious how everyone has just forgotten that used to be a thing" Ads were always a thing, they're just going to be better targeted with more info. There is no free lunch, so what this means is the 'no cookie' users may be exposed to more ads. I understand the market dynamics are not working very well, but we have to remember that information provided is not free either.
- tuco86 8y agoyou will get as many ads as the typical user is able to bare no matter what.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoThe underlying economics are unavoidable. Companies are not trying to 'do inherent evil' - they just want to show relevant ads. And by the way, consumers definitely appreciate the relevance. There is another side to the equation, and there are economic consequences to all of this that will come home to root. Personally, I loathe Facebook and don't use it for personal reasons, but I have a small business and it's the only advertising mechanism that works for us: we have a neat little product for a niche category. There are entire economies that can only exist with the ability to effectively get the word out, there is tremendous social good in this. We just have to figure out a way to do it that fits within reasonable privacy guidelines.
- wolco 8y agoI have my own ad that I made for a client. No third party is offering these kinda of ads because of fraud.
- kristianp 8y agoIs that really true?
- bsanr 8y agoData addiction. Just say no.
- repolfx 8y agoIt has never been a thing, that's why. Adverts have been targeted for decades before the internet existed at all. Do you think TV adverts are placed randomly? They aren't. Different times of day have different value to different advertisers. TV ads are targeted based on detailed knowledge of audience demographics. Do you think billboard ads are placed randomly? They aren't. Their placement is optimised based on the beliefs of the ad firms about who will drive past them or see them. Do you think internet ads were placed randomly before AdSense? No, they were targeted by rough demographic guessed from the sites content just like TV and billboard ads were. All that's changed on the internet is that targeted has got more precise and more sophisticated. But there's no bright line separating "generic" from "targeted" ads, like you imagine. And the better targeting is hardly an optional feature like the DPAs seem to imagine. It increases revenues which enables firms to provide new content and new features. Roll back the web to 1990s era ad techniques and now all the ads on generic sites like news or search with no clearly defined audience will be barrel-scraping "punch the monkey" animations, for those of us who remember that stuff.
- skybrian 8y agoWell, saying it's ridiculous isn't an argument. it's expensive and maybe non-viable for many websites. But it's not like all websites need to exist? There was a world wide web before cookies.
- duxup 8y ago>There was a world wide web before cookies. I like to think of that time as a great time too, but oh man so much we couldn't do.... I get what you're saying generally, but man I'd hate "before cookies" to be the standard.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Jach 8y agoThe big use of cookies for re-authentication and carrying around a session id enabled clean URLs lacking your session id as a query param, but it wouldn't be that big of a deal to lose it. You'd need to be careful with copy-pasting URLs -- but given browsers standardized on cookies they could have standardized on a sessionId param name to filter out of copy-pastes or not even display it at all similar to Chrome's proposal to not display the protocol, just a "secure" flag or not. A similar "session context established" flag could have been made. And in the age of password managers and/or having your browser remember your login, it wouldn't be that much of a loss to require logging in to everything again every time you restart your browser... maybe more of a pain with 2FA. I don't really see it as "what we couldn't do" but "what poor usability we have overcome". I'm glad we have cookies and other forms of local storage, especially for the latter there are many other benefits. Maybe one day we'll get Web SQL. In the meantime people can still disable cookies entirely, or at least delete them when they close the browser, both with out of the box browser settings (and I have no idea what extensions are available to do even more) and return to that less-usable (if slightly more private) experience. The crucial idea of a "user agent" is I think the biggest mindset change the web brought, it's important to keep that even if on the dev side we constantly complain about being asked to support more than one configuration of anything.
- josephg 8y agoYes absolutely! Websites need to find revenue models that don’t depend on violating the privacy of their users. That stance makes a lot of sense to me.
- cortesoft 8y agoThere are tons of websites that have other revenue models. Subscriptions, referral models, etc. Shouldn't people be able to choose what currency they want to pay for something in?
- dageshi 8y agoIt's been proven over and over again that people won't pay for content that gets successfully monetised with advertising. You only have to see the howling every time someone posts a subscription only newspaper link on HN to see how vehemently opposed people are to paying for stuff like news.
- themacguffinman 8y agoSo that means consumers have chosen to forgo their privacy to avoid paying money for content. Why can't I make that choice myself?
- dageshi 8y agoWhy doesn't MC Donalds sell pizza? (I know they did at some point and gave it up). Because their customers don't want it, or at least not enough of them do.
- rhizome 8y ago"Subscribe or fuck off" is a stupid business model when it costs practically nothing to implement multiple revenue streams. This is such an obvious point.
- josephg 8y ago> Shouldn't people be able to choose what currency they want to pay for something in? Thats a very libertarian position statement and I understand it. But the EU is much less capitalist/libertarian than you are. Their parliament made the call that they don't want people paying for services with their personal data. There's valid arguments on both sides here. Some arguments supporting the EU's stance: - If online newspapers get paid in proportion to views, they make more money by writing divisive clickbait - Privacy is a fundamental right; not a currency. Treating it as currency means only wealthy people will be free from spying, and that is borderline dystopian. - Advertising on the internet worked just fine before everyone was tracked and monitored through every click. Don't annoy me with cookie notices. Just don't use cookies for tracking and we'll get along fine.
- renholder 8y ago>So websites are supposed to just absorb the cost? That seems like a ridiculous stance. The €0.00002 it took to serve that one page just because the user doesn't want to consent to cookie placement/tracking? Is it really that harmful? NPR seems to do this just fine for GDPR reasons: Decline and Visit Plain Text Site
- laumars 8y agoIn fairness it can add up pretty quickly on popular sites. I do love NPRs approach though.
- renholder 8y ago>In fairness it can add up pretty quickly on popular sites. Aye, if they're only looking at it from a "cookie placement/tracking or nothing" hard-limit perspective, which is what the OC posited it as. ...but if other sites can absorb the costs, case in point: NPR, why is it such a dastardly evil thing to point out? Is there some foolhearted belief that if we cut tracking, tomorrow, the internet would cease to function? Is there absolutely no room for advertisements without cookies/pixels in the modern world...? Do we really believe that it's that expensive to serve webpages?
- leetcrew 8y agoof course it's not expensive to serve pages. but creating content and services that are worth serving can be pretty expensive.
- cortesoft 8y agoThe cost to serve the page is a misleading number to use. You also have to factor in the cost to create the content, manage the service, etc. I mean, by your argument, all digital goods should be free, since it never costs much to transmit the bits.
- renholder 8y agoMy argument was one user who requested one page and didn't want to consent to cookies/tracking in order to offset the ridiculously low cost of serving the actual page (I'm considering the cost to make it as having already been burdened, as it's already being served). The OC didn't consider the fact that you can have advertising without cookies/tracking/fingerprinting and just reduced it to absrudism by saying that the company would bear the brunt of the cost but even the cost of that single event is marginally insignificant, overall. So, no, my argument was never about all digital goods being free. However, if we want to play the devil's advocate and utilise your reduction to absurdism: By your argument, shouldn't all digital goods be paid for...? For example, Ubuntu costs money to host and serve, yeah?
- barkingcat 8y agoyou can actually have an ad without tracking you know that right?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- probably_wrong 8y agoWebsites are allowed to charge you. They are also allowed to show (non-tracking) ads, and they can also track you if you agree to it. What is not allowed is to withdraw services to those that want to exercise their right to privacy.
- plopz 8y agoThanks, this helps clear up some of my understanding. I still think its ridiculous that websites can't refuse to serve who they want.
- nothal 8y agoWhy? It's relatively common for governments to prohibit businesses and services from discriminating against certain types of users, why do you think it's ridiculous in this specific case?
- umanwizard 8y agoThe only examples I can think of for the US where this happens have to do with historically discriminated classes of identities; e.g., gender, racial minority, etc. Are there other examples?
- cortesoft 8y agoWhether we like it or not, tracking data used for ads is the currency of the free internet. It is how things are paid for. This is like a government saying to a restaurant "You can't discriminate against people who don't want to pay you money for the food. You can ask them if they are willing to give you money for the sandwich, but if they say no, you still have to give them the sandwich"
- tuco86 8y ago"the government" as in >we the people< says to all the restaurants (and groceries): this stripping of all of our clothes before entering is nonsense and we can't choose not to eat, so we will force you.
- rdiddly 8y agoIf the cost is for hosting a bloated 14MB page, 30% of which is hostile JavaScript, let's talk about ridiculous. "But we need that JavaScript to scrape the data and run the ads to pay for hosting all that JavaScript!" My stance is even more ridiculous: Deadbeats who can't afford hosting without begging, selling ads, or turning against their users, scale your site down to something that's cheap to host, or get the hell off the internet. Back to the amateur web of the 90s. It was fine.
- yspeak 8y agoYes back to the 90s. I'm thinking actually 1993 or thereabouts. Gopher was great. No ads at all. Who needs them.
- At1C 8y agoBelieve me they are getting paid, read surveillance capitalism for the real story, http://www.shoshanazuboff.com/new/recent-publications-and-interviews/big-other-surveillance-capitalism-and-the-prospects-of-an-information-civilization/ http://www.shoshanazuboff.com/new/recent-publications-and-in... stop deferring your choice! to big technology monopolies, tell them stuff their cookies where the sun don't shine.