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It is an extra compliance cost & financial risk imposed by the EU, with essentially no benefit for the website. It also provides negligible benefit for any EU

by gojomo 5y ago

It is an extra compliance cost & financial risk imposed by the EU, with essentially no benefit for the website. It also provides negligible benefit for any EU subject, compared to what the privacy-conscious users could achieve via self-help for themselves – by not registering, or clearing cookies, or using other tech measures. Have trillions (or quadrillions?) of EU cookie popups actually preserved any privacy at all? Or just wasted staff time, reader time, & trained a 'consent dialog blindness' into users worldwide?

jacquesm 5y ago
It's a benefit to the public, the fact that companies go so far as to refuse to be compliant tells you how addicted to all this data they really are. The cookie popups were the wrong response to well intentioned legislation, the proper response would have been to stop using cookies, not to use these stupid banners. Functional cookies were never a problem, but tracking people indiscriminately is a problem. Consent dialog blindness is a good term, but it is caused by the makers of the consent dialogs not by the legislators. Not tracking is a viable alternative and does not require any dialogs.
- gojomo 5y ago
  That US news sites find their EU visitors of such low value that they'd rather block them than spend to be compliant (& thus still get some aggregate or opt-in data) is a pretty strong refutation of the idea they're "addicted to all this data". What's the tangible harm of this supposed "indiscriminate tracking" - especially as compared to other burgeoning EU initiatives like demanding law-enforcement backdoors into e2e chat sessions? The consent-dialog-blindness is created by the regulatory demands for their constant re-display, for negligible benefit. If not even asking for cookies was 'viable', major sites – who have far better understanding of the relative tradeoffs than the regulators – would've gone that way. Can you name any that chose that 'viable' path? Are they winning their categories with that 'viability'? You know what else is 'viable'? User self help. Clearing/disabling cookies. Running a privacy-protecting browser, like say Brave. The EU could've protected a lot more privacy, without wasting the world's time & burning-out people's attention, if it had coached people into self-protection, rather than threatening businesses worldwide with fines. But hey, haughty mega-super-state's gotta do mega-super-stating.

by gojomo 5y ago

jacquesm 5y ago

It's a benefit to the public, the fact that companies go so far as to refuse to be compliant tells you how addicted to all this data they really are. The cookie popups were the wrong response to well intentioned legislation, the proper response would have been to stop using cookies, not to use these stupid banners. Functional cookies were never a problem, but tracking people indiscriminately is a problem. Consent dialog blindness is a good term, but it is caused by the makers of the consent dialogs not by the legislators. Not tracking is a viable alternative and does not require any dialogs.

gojomo 5y ago
That US news sites find their EU visitors of such low value that they'd rather block them than spend to be compliant (& thus still get some aggregate or opt-in data) is a pretty strong refutation of the idea they're "addicted to all this data". What's the tangible harm of this supposed "indiscriminate tracking" - especially as compared to other burgeoning EU initiatives like demanding law-enforcement backdoors into e2e chat sessions? The consent-dialog-blindness is created by the regulatory demands for their constant re-display, for negligible benefit. If not even asking for cookies was 'viable', major sites – who have far better understanding of the relative tradeoffs than the regulators – would've gone that way. Can you name any that chose that 'viable' path? Are they winning their categories with that 'viability'? You know what else is 'viable'? User self help. Clearing/disabling cookies. Running a privacy-protecting browser, like say Brave. The EU could've protected a lot more privacy, without wasting the world's time & burning-out people's attention, if it had coached people into self-protection, rather than threatening businesses worldwide with fines. But hey, haughty mega-super-state's gotta do mega-super-stating.