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The linked source: https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/new-cookie-choices-in-europe/ https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/new-cooki
by tjoff 5y ago
The linked source: https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/new-cookie-choices-in-europe/ https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/new-cooki...
It is "funny" reading that, the amount of energy they spend to be illegal but only just so that they can squeeze as much dark patterns on their users before they get a fine. Rinse and repeat.
For normal companies / webmasters it is quite simple though. You don't have anything to gain from extorting your users. So please respect your users instead.
Don't use shady practices that require you to bring up a cookie-banner in the first place. Just don't.
- nicbou 5y agoShady practices like knowing how many visitors you get on your website? Don't get me wrong, there's the excellent Plausible for that, but collecting usage statistics is far from shady.
- throwaway5371 5y agoyou can do that without selling out your users
- nicbou 5y agoYep, and we clever HN people know that. But the web isn't all clever hackers. There are lots of small businesses with WordPress websites who just want to see a graph on a page. They will keep adding cookie banner plugins so long as they can keep seeing that graph. I switched to plausible because the added privacy is also a major UX benefit: there's no GDPR banner on my website.
- belorn 5y agoI would claim, based exclusively on experience, that most small businesses websites are built by web design companies. It is people working in the web shop industry that make decision about build tools. Also in my experience, there isn't usually a GDPR banner on small businesses websites built on wordpress. A pizzeria, barber, local grocery store, or some other small businesses don't really have or need much on their website. A few images, a page for location/contact, a page about the employees/founders, and for the more advanced ones a web shop. No GDPR needed for any of that, and for those web shops, once a person is registered all the consent are usually given as part of the registration processing. The typical model that I see for small businesses is also one where no one need or want a graph over visitors. The customer pay the web shops a one-time fee to build the site, and then it mostly sits there until the customer decide to build a completely new website because the old one is getting too old. No A-B testing, no optimization for user retention, no frontend interactions, no user flows. Mostly all the customer want is to not be paying a web developer any more money. This is why some shops will utilize "proprietary modules" in order to keep the customer on their (usually partners) servers, in case the customer might get ideas of moving the site to a better/cheaper hosting provider. The most common situation that I know of when people are requesting visitor graphs is either when customer apply an marketing campaign and want to see the effect on their website, or when a conglomerate has acquired a bunch of smaller companies and want to make decision about closing down/merging specific website. In those cases the analytics usually get added when that need arrive.
- aaomidi 5y agoYou can do this without tracking cookies. Literally your access logs will give you this information.
- aidanlister 5y agoThat’ll give you visits, not uniques.
- hedora 5y agoYes. One of those things is legal to track without permission. The other isn't.
- nikeee 5y agoThey certainly can provide uniqueness to some degree. GoatCounter [1] does that. [1]: https://www.goatcounter.com https://www.goatcounter.com
- kenniskrag 5y agothey do not have a kpi on "how long stayed the visitor on the page"
- nikeee 5y agoSadly no, but that's a different KPI than "how many visitors you get on your website".
- ghusto 5y agoThey don't, no. If optimising for that kind of thing is necessary for a business, then that business is in my opinion one that can go away. It's like how search results are almost entirely rubbish now, because things are optimised for what Google looks for. So similarly, I have no sympathy for sites that need that kind of analytics.
- kenniskrag 5y ago
- tomc1985 5y agoLet them analyze their webserver logs then. You don't need a cookie to geolocate users via IP
- mgkimsal 5y ago20 users from the same IP - should they count as one user or 20?
- philistine 5y agoThis whole thing reeks of taking the easy way out and dumping the problem on the user. Why can't you analyze usage patterns in a controlled environment to identify the typical number of page loads? You end up at a statistical answer like 20 hits to our home page equal 6.3 users, statistically speaking.
- minusf 5y agoif there are 20 different user agents, i would count that as 20 separate users.
- kibwen 5y agoWhy care? Despite all the pearl-clutching, knowing how many visitors you have is only marginally useful data at best, so it doesn't need to be precise.
- nicbou 5y agoAre you being disingenuous? Do you really think that commercial websites can operate without knowing if their visitor count dropped by 15% over 30 days, or what their visitors come looking for, or through which channels they find and buy your products?
- account42 5y agoNone of that requires distinguishing users from hits, definitely not beyond the guesses you can make from server-side logs.
- passivate 5y agoMy guess is Google would fire their own employees if they started making a list of co-workers habits/interests.
- ghusto 5y agoI have that information, I don't need cookies for it, and neither does anyone else. I don't know why this (false) use case gets banded about so much, but my gods does it annoy me.
- stingraycharles 5y agoReliably identifying a (unique) visitor is pretty difficult using ip logs, though. Cookies generally make this much easier, at the very least identifying a visit. With ip logs, you’re not just dealing with the fact that IP addresses are often shared between people (eg behind a NAT), you now also need to record IP addresses, which arguably is an even bigger privacy violation than just using cookies. I’m not saying that one method is always better than the other, but it’s definitely not as black-and-white as you make it out to be.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoPublucations, radio, and TV were profitable without identifying unique users. Why does a website require this?
- QuikAccount 5y agoNielsen ratings would disagree with this.
- IanCal 5y agoI think that's a disingenuous reading. Nielsen ratings are for small subsets of users who explicitly opt in to tracking. That's not the same as "uniquely identify all end users of my website" it's like paying user testers.
- scarface74 5y agoNielsen tried it’s best to get a demographically representative sample of households. It wasn’t purely a self selected sample. I doubt people were incentivized by the $5 they put in envelopes.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago> Shady practices like knowing how many visitors you get on your website? Exactly. Web masters aren't entitled to that information. > collecting usage statistics is far from shady I don't want to be part of any of your statistics. I'm not some human test subject you get to study without my informed consent.
- nicbou 5y agoTotally fair, but it's still not shady
- hackerfromthefu 5y agoBut the reality of the 'total information awareness' that the profiling systems build up on you, your actions on site, all the sites you go to .. that is beyond the level of the worst stalkers. Shady doesn't being to cover it!
- shadowgovt 5y agoBut you are a stranger logging onto my public servers without my explicit consent. Where's my vested interest as server owner in knowing something about who is exfiltrating my data?
- matheusmoreira 5y agoIf you don't consent to my connection to your server, all you have to do is return HTTP 403 Forbidden. Alternatively, you may simply not reply to my HTTP requests at all.
- shadowgovt 5y agoI believe the GDPR specifically forbids that sort of configuration. By which I mean, I'm not allowed to deny you service if you aren't happy with consenting to my collection of your data.
- 5y ago
- samizdis 5y ago> Shady practices like knowing how many visitors you get on your website? Perhaps I am taking that statement too literally, but in the last century I could just look at my server logs to find out how many, from which IP addresses, and the referrer. No need for cookies for that info at all.