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GDPR – No reject option – what to do?
- clircle 6y agoIf I ignore privacy banners (or click the 'x') do the websites I visit go about their business as if I had clicked accept?
- pornel 6y agoIt's not legal, but they probably do so anyway.
- marssaxman 6y agoI use uBlock Origin to delete the GDPR banner, clicking neither "accept" nor "reject". I just hide it. I have no idea whether this makes any legal difference, and I am sure the assholes responsible don't care either way, but it makes me feel better to circumvent the silliness.
- ezzato 6y agoSome do some don't. The GDPR strictly requires an explicit opt-in. So it's reasonable to assume that clicking on 'X' is a rejection. But some website do not accept that as a rejection.
- mnw21cam 6y agoThis particular web site states openly that they do take clicking on the "X" as acceptance of tracking.
- chomp 6y agoClick the X?
- ezzato 6y agoQuoting the banner: "You can consent to the use of such technologies by closing this notice"
- Traster 6y agoWell the implication of that sentence is therefore that if you click "Accept" you're simply accepting that you can consent by closing the notice. Therefore clicking the X is consenting, and clicking "Accept" is choosing not to consent.
- 0-_-0 6y agoI really wish the above reasoning could stand up in court!
- ezzato 6y agoAs a European I encounter a lot dark patterns to circumvent privacy laws. Some just ignore your choice and track you. Some don't give you a reject option. Some make it really really annoying (or slow) to reject. Do you think it's possible to politely ask them on twitter to change? Maybe as a group?
- aequitas 6y ago> Some make it really really annoying (or slow) to reject. Some even make it slow to accept, or reload to a homepage after submitting, instead of back to the original page. It just doesn't make any sense to me. But apparently people just accept it as the way the internet is nowadays.
- atleta 6y agoReload probably means that they have implemented it fully on the server side. So the cookie (about the cookies) gets set through the server, or worse, they initially send down the cookies and then clear them with the reload. If you are talking about this and not malicious reloads that make giving a consent harder. (I haven't seen that latter and the former doesn't bother me.)
- SilasX 6y agoI thought there was an official governmental point of contact that handled such complaints, and had teeth?
- gregoriol 6y agoIn France there is CNIL (https://www.cnil.fr/ https://www.cnil.fr/) and they seem to try to follow-up on reports, at least for french located companies/websites I think.
- ezzato 6y agoI filled 2 years ago a few complaints. It took over 1 year for an answer. Basically nothing happened. The Data Protection Authority are underfunded and understaffed. They try the best with their resources.
- RandallBrown 6y agoThe reject option would be leaving the banner up wouldn't it? Does that break the law?
- ezzato 6y agoIn this case the footer banner is not accessible with an open cookie banner. E.g. German law requires the website owner to have a legal link to the website representative. In this case, only by consenting to the cookies I could have access to those links.
- alkonaut 6y agoYou can’t use the site/service as well as the person accepting then? So it’s obviously in violation
- CyberRabbi 6y agoThe best reject option is to disable cookies completely for casual browsing.
- fsflover 6y agoOr destroy the whole virtual machine used for casual browsing. Except tracking includes browser fingerprint, which will not be reset even in this way.
- cortesoft 6y agoUnless we all share the same VM image...
- fogihujy 6y agoI assume it would be a performance disaster, but transparently running the browsing process in identical VM's would probably make fingerprinting much harder. I like the idea!
- fsflover 6y agoUnfortunately this is not so simple. I am using Qubes OS with disposable virtual machines and my fingerprint is always unique. Have a look at the corresponding discussion if you are interested: https://qubes-os.discourse.group/t/is-your-browser-fingerprint-unique/987 https://qubes-os.discourse.group/t/is-your-browser-fingerpri....
- fogihujy 6y agoThanks!
- CyberRabbi 6y agoFingerprinting is nearly impossible with JS and cookies disabled, which is how I casually browse. And yes i spoof my user agent. IP is their best signal, and admittedly they fall back to that. I often get ads intended for my housemates.
- gcatalfamo 6y agoMost websites, made by low budget webdevs which are thriving thanks to companies asking for low budget websites[1], do not consider - even in the EU - the reject option. In the large majority of websites, Google Analytics fires even before the cookie banner, and the banner is only used to inform you that by continuing navigation you are accepting to be tracked. Yes, this is illegal. But not enforceable. [1]: there are devs selling websites for 500 dollars/euros.
- stefanfisk 6y agoMy experience is that customers don't even want a reject option, and that pricing is not really part of the question.
- ezzato 6y agoThat's true. As long as they have not to bear the external cost it's cheap to pollute. But the market is two sided. We can bring the cost to the polluter if we choose to.
- gcatalfamo 6y agopricing correlates to 0.95 with poorly managed cookies in my anecdotal experience. Customers don't even know what all that means, they just want a cheap, functioning website.
- iamben 6y agoYes, and most consumers outside the tech space just want to access the content. 95% of my friends have no clue what a cookie is - they just press the green button and get on with their shopping. It's not an education issue either - they just don't particularly care.
- alkonaut 6y agoExactly - and the regulators thought of this. The obvious/simple/default option MUST be the one that protects the users information the most, or the GDPR is violated. The law is written understanding that users are lazy/ignorant/non-technical. Anything else would have been useless.
- agd 6y agoChecking whether cookie banners are compliant should be mostly straightforward for regulatory bodies. In 90% of cases it’s clear if there’s opt in or not. Why can’t regulatory bodies set up automated flows and tools to handle this at scale? Don’t need to catch every case but they should be able to massively scale the complaints process for this.
- cj 6y agoIf the regulatory bodies have a list of people actively breaking the law, and the public knows that, it would require them to make a decision “do we do anything about this or not” Based on the lack of any real regulatory action under GDPR, I’m guessing regulators would prefer not knowing who’s breaking the law since they aren’t actively enforcing GDPR (for better or worse).
- atleta 6y agoIt is, but there are a huge number of web sites. And I don't think automation is possible unless you are only allowed to use an approved consent script.
- anotheryou 6y agoIt's not illegal to just cookie-wall your whole site without options, or is it? This site here e.g. does it: https://www.spiegel.de/ https://www.spiegel.de/ imprint is still reachable, but if you want to read this news site you'll have to allow all the tracking crap.
- notimetorelax 6y agoIt is illegal, they cannot offer free but tracked vs paid and untracked service. I guess GDPR enforcement didn't reach them yet.
- anotheryou 6y agoweird. they are well known in germany
- notimetorelax 6y agoI think enforcement is not there yet, here’s another very similar example: https://iapp.org/news/a/ico-tells-washington-post-it-offers-invalid-cookie-consent-under-gdpr/ https://iapp.org/news/a/ico-tells-washington-post-it-offers-...
- dogma1138 6y agoYes you can, you can provide an add supported service with tracking and a paid one without. Both via legitimate interest and consent.
- alkonaut 6y agoThe service cannot be dependent on the acceptance of third party cookies, no. That is, the service provided to those that reject third party cookies cannot be worse (slower or incomplete, for example) compared to the visitors who accept cookies. So you can supply an ad supported version and a paid version without ads, but you cannot require that those that choose the ad supported version must accept tracking ads.
- mfontani 6y ago> Google Analytics fires even before the cookie banner That might well not be a problem, depending on how the configuration and setup of Google Analytics was done in that case. From https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-analytics-gdpr/ https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-analytics-gdpr/ - turn on IP anonymisation - don't send personal data - don't send pseudonymous identifiers - I add: tell GA to not set cookies and to not track the user (IIRC it's "storage" set to "none" and "storeGac" set to false) If one does that when the user's not opted-in to "analytics" or "tracking", that ought to be enough to satisfy informed consent, no? The site is then just tracking page views, with no personal information or cookies to fly around. If the user then opts-in to analytics then the site's code could well send more pseudonymous data to Google Analytics, with the user's consent, as well as tell GA it's fine to track the user around the site using a cookie or whatever other means. Same goes for the setup for Adwords or similar: it's all in the hands of the website, and so long as things are configured to not track the user, it might be fine. If a site's livelihood depends on showing ads to users, it doesn't mean that the user has to opt-in to ads. They ought to opt-in to being tracked by the ad provider. So, configure _that_ -- no opt in? No tracking. Opt in? Tracking, remarketing, retargeting, what-have-you. It's all about "playing safe" and _not_ tracking when the user's not opted in. Many sites instead do it the other way around, and do it all until/unless the user's opted-out. And even then, I wouldn't hold my breath that they're really doing it. Some are, or at least try hard to.
- caludio 6y agoWhy are you all talking about the "reject option", which implicitly considers the opt-in to be the default? The default MUST be the opt-out (for non-essential cookies), hence there is no "reject" because there must be the "accept".
- atleta 6y agoYou can be forced to choose, i.e. you can be presented with a popup. And that popup should have both a reject (opt-out) and an accept (opt-in) option. Well, the latter is not needed but otherwise it wouldn't make sense. Now a lot of sites play tricks to make the reject/out-out a hard deliberately choice. (Which IS a violation of the GDPR, of course.)
- tobib 6y agoI love how it says "Learn more and customize" but doesn't actually let you customize anything. Just shows you dozens of links where you can supposedly "Opt out" by going to the target directly.
- alkonaut 6y agoEither a site has the opt out choice clear, marked by default (the bigger/more visible button), or it should be reported. Obviously authorities can’t follow up on every small player here, so the key is to make an example by imposing some extremely large fines on some large companies. Anyone who sees it should think “whatever we risk losing by losing 99% ad revenue is better than THAT”. Preferably sanctions should include personal sanctions on decisionmakers but I’m not sure if that’s possible as the regulation works now. It needs to be made a proper criminal offense so that investigators have the tools they need. An efficient way to go about this could be to find one of the companies that supplies these dark pattern services (sells cookie gateway services), demand lists of their customers and verify that they indeed used that product - and fine all off them off the face of the internet.
- atleta 6y agoThis pattern is kind of like what MicroSoft did in the ninties with their license agreement: it was contained in the shrink-wrapped box and the agreement said that by opening the shrink-wrap you've accepted the terms. These accept-only 'consents' do the same type of trolling. Sometimes they even say on top of that that by using the site you accept their use of cookies. (Which is OK, as long as they only use essential, e.g. session cookies, but a lot of the time it's not the case.)
- ezzato 6y agoUPDATE: the cookie banner was updated. A reject option is now available! https://twitter.com/LetMeReject/status/1366473613709365257?s=20 https://twitter.com/LetMeReject/status/1366473613709365257?s... Thanks to everyone supporting this. We changed the world a little bit. If you think this format has potential please follow @LetMeReject.
- singularity2001 6y agoSame on youtube! Only 'I agree' and 'See more' which leads to other dead-ends.