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Correct. The question for law is: what does a reasonable person expect? This is a problem because people (in general) are not good at understanding or reasonin

by dsr_ 5y ago

Correct. The question for law is: what does a reasonable person expect? This is a problem because people (in general) are not good at understanding or reasoning about what computers do... and the entire purpose of the web is to put a simplifying, abstract model in between what humans want to do and how computers work. Models are always wrong, sometimes useful. The web is very useful because it is wrong. If the web were more like Gemini -- I'm not advocating for this -- every link would be an explicit change, and the argument that a reasonable person would be aware that different things came from different entities would be solid. If JavaScript existed but a web page could not request any resource from a non-origin domain, the argument would be solid. It's not reasonable for a random user to have to internalize a model that says that sometimes the font used by a page is local, sometimes it is supplied by the website, and sometimes it is a call to a third party. It's true, but it's not reasonable.

marcus_cemes 5y ago
From my experience, I think the average user treats the browser and the internet as a black box anyway, they don't reason about what is happening. As long as they can get to what they want, they don't really care what happens in between. Cookie notices get in the way, and therefore annoy them. Most also just accept the fact that there data gets leaked everywhere and there's not much that they can do about it. I genuinely don't believe that the average user can make sense of the TOS that they agree to when signing up for something... This is definitely not a good thing, and should change, but I also believe that ad-driven companies will continue to find a way, we just continue to rack up operating complexity, which in turn, favours large companies. This ruling seems like a pretty weird and unhelpful way (in the grand scheme of things) of helping protect user privacy, but then again, that was not the goal of the lawsuit.

by dsr_ 5y ago

marcus_cemes 5y ago

From my experience, I think the average user treats the browser and the internet as a black box anyway, they don't reason about what is happening. As long as they can get to what they want, they don't really care what happens in between. Cookie notices get in the way, and therefore annoy them. Most also just accept the fact that there data gets leaked everywhere and there's not much that they can do about it. I genuinely don't believe that the average user can make sense of the TOS that they agree to when signing up for something... This is definitely not a good thing, and should change, but I also believe that ad-driven companies will continue to find a way, we just continue to rack up operating complexity, which in turn, favours large companies. This ruling seems like a pretty weird and unhelpful way (in the grand scheme of things) of helping protect user privacy, but then again, that was not the goal of the lawsuit.