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This cookie insanity has to stop. Instead of adding popups everywhere, users should’ve been trained to use the options of their browsers, which have existed for
by bzb6 6y ago
This cookie insanity has to stop. Instead of adding popups everywhere, users should’ve been trained to use the options of their browsers, which have existed for decades.
- Macha 6y agoCompanies would still have to be mandated to respect said options, as when the voluntary DNT was added, companies went "lalala can't hear you"
- bzb6 6y agoThen they should’ve been fined for not respecting dnt
- Macha 6y agoDNT was a browser initiative and had no legal teeth
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoThen what is the reason that `robots.txt` is so widely followed even without a legal requirement to do so?
- zinekeller 6y agoThere is an incentive to not abuse their own server time serving robots, essentially creating the status quo. Meanwhile, advertisers value users' data like gold. Unlike server time, most advertisers are okay to collect their own data for advertising purposes, and this causes them to have an unwritten agreement to collect data. Unless there is a stronger stick to force them otherwise, it is in their best interests to collect data and you need to have active intervention to prevent it.
- Macha 6y agoServer operators are more capable of blocking badly behaving bots than users are of blocking adtech companies. Consequently you follow the limits in robots.txt or you risk getting blocked. On the other hand, if you follow the limits in DNT, you get nothing, and the consequences of not doing so are ... nothing, so companies did not follow that. (See also P3P for another previous attempt)
- lukeschlather 6y agoYou can't just scrape websites and ignore robots.txt, you will get into infinite loops. That doesn't mean people don't do it anyway, but "first pass" scraping it is more efficient to respect robots.txt, and then you can come in with a human to figure out if anything behind robots.txt is surreptitiously possible to scrape. On the other hand, Google etc. do not care enough, they just respect robots.txt because they don't need to index your site if you don't want them to, it hurts you more than it hurts them. DNT has no mutual benefit, the benefit is only to the end-user asking not to be tracked. The benefit is also not immediate, it's somewhere down the road. Ignoring robots.txt can immediately cause problems for both the client and server.
- blub 6y agoOn the contrary, companies should be trained not to use dark patterns to trick people and not to abuse cookies by tying together tracking and spying with visiting a web site.
- landerwust 6y agoIf any browser vendor just pushed a trivial standard like X-Consent: no-cookies X-Consent: cookies-ok Sites would have gobbled that header up overnight, and the other browsers would have received substantial pressure to follow. But it's a missed beat by now, nobody is paying to have hundreds of thousands of web sites updated for such a thing even if it did exist. Sucks none of the major browser vendors are based in Europe or this might have happened. Meanwhile, I'm no lawyer, it's not clear whether the header would pass the legal test, but I'm sure a sufficiently motivated party might have a good shot at arguing that it did
- oefrha 6y agocough DNT cough
- robin_reala 6y agoThe good thing is we only have to look at the abject failure of do-not-track to see that this approach categorically doesn’t work.
- aenario 6y agoNot quite sure if this is sarcasm ? The do not track header is about 10 years old, ans was promptly ignored by all websites DNT: 1 DNT: 0
- landerwust 6y agoHrm fair point. I'm not sure DNT could have been repurposed to imply consent under much newer regulations, but you're generally right, this mechanism predated the EU regs and somehow was passed up.
- ohgodplsno 6y agoAs it stood, DNT was used as an additional 1.5 bytes of identifying information: Yes/No/Not Set. To be then promptly ignored.
- distances 6y ago
- gpderetta 6y agoI did set DNT but I'm still getting tracked. I do not want to disable all cookies, I'm perfectly happy to use credential cookies or a shopping cart, I do not want to disable everything indiscriminately. Also I shouldn't have to out out.
- scambier 6y ago> I do not want to disable all cookies, I'm perfectly happy to use credential cookies or a shopping cart The cookie banner that you have to refuse/accept only concerns cookies that are not necessary for the proper functioning of the site. So login cookies or shopping cart are unaffected by the consent, and if your site has nothing else than this, it does not need to ask for consent.
- Macha 6y agoMany sites, upon clicking reject, do not actually disable anything and simply suggest you disable cookies in your browser (sometimes with instructions).
- TheCoelacanth 6y agoWhich is probably not legal.
- Macha 6y agoProbably not. That's why we need legal enforcement, and not "users learn how to use the cookie options of their browsers" as these sites and the top level comment on this thread suggest.
- that_guy_iain 6y agoWe're at the stage now where they can reasonably reliably track you without cookies. I think we need to focus more on restricting what companies can do with data than focusing on asking users permission for things. Popup-hell doesn't help anyone in my opinion.
- orwin 6y agoDNT was made for this. In-browser, voluntary. How well did it work?
- aquadrop 6y agoBetter than cookies popups, at least it didn't create huge annoying thing.
- jeanjogr 6y agoI agree: any company which does not respect DNT should be heavily fined at a minimum, with executives in jail. This would ensure fast adoption.
- johnchristopher 6y agoBrowser's UI for cookies is severely lacking though. It's been at least a decade since a browser asked me to store a cookie.