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Yes, the regulators screwed this up. It's the browser that decides to store a cookie or not. And if the browser UI sucks people can switch and go on with their

Yes, the regulators screwed this up. It's the browser that decides to store a cookie or not. And if the browser UI sucks people can switch and go on with their lives.

atoav 4y ago
This is not about storing cookies or not alone, it is about consent to do so. And to give this consent the site has to tell me what it does and for which purposes it does that. Good, there could have been a standardized way to ask for that consent — but to me the way a site tries to trick you into consenting is yet another data point whether I want to be on this site.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  If you are not using incognito then you are getting tracked. These consent popups are close to useless because only good actors will obey the law, and as we’ve seen the vast majority of websites are somewhere between grey hat (asking but in a way that breaks the law) and black hat (not asking at all). What we need is better isolation at the browser and web protocol level. This is a technical problem, not a regulatory problem. You cannot regulate actors who don’t obey the law in the first place.
  - atoav 4y ago
    Those who disobey the law can be sued. People just need to start doing it. The goal of the law is partly to make people who run websites aware of what they do with the data of their visitors. And that means for one part that they need to know what happens with things they embed in thwir site like google analytics and google fonts (for which someone has been sued already). But it also means that once website owners are informed they can decide wheter they want to ask people for their consent or whether they just remove those third party options. In reality many don't inform themselves at all and just slap a cookie thing onto their page, because that's what all the others are doing — just like they did with google analytics et al. Not knowing the law is not an excuse which will help you once someone sues you tho.
    - zarzavat 4y ago
      There are not enough lawyers or court capacity to take the entire www to court, and even if there were, there's no way to enforce injunctions or collect on judgments when websites are operated in different countries. This is evidenced by the fact that the GDPR already made these actions illegal with huge penalties and it has had scarcely any effect. Most websites just ignore it completely as a "strange foreign law", including this one.
  - iamacyborg 4y ago
    > If you are not using incognito then you are getting tracked You’re being tracked in incognito mode, too.
- mormegil 4y ago
  There is/was a standardized way similar to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P It was complicated and never caught on. I'd say the basic problem (visible also in the DNT fiasco) is that if you ask a user in a global and easy to understand way if he wants to accept tracking cookies, he'll say "no" once and for all, and that's it: you just disabled all tracking cookies everywhere. The only way it can work from the point of view of the tracking companies is to use these obnoxious dialogs everywhere: that way, at least some people will accept the cookies from lazyness.
- jon-wood 4y ago
  Dubbing this “cookie consent” is almost conspiracy level misguiding of the public by advertisers. It’s not about cookies at all, they’re fine, it’s about using those cookies to track people around the internet and sell their data. Frustratingly it seems to have worked. Recently I had to explain cookies vs tracking to a data protection analyst at work.
- cheriot 4y ago
  > Good, there could have been a standardized way to ask for that consent — but to me the way a site tries to trick you into consenting is yet another data point whether I want to be on this site. I get really annoyed at having to care. The economics for content sites are so poor I feel bad for a lot of them. > This is not about storing cookies or not alone, it is about consent to do so. Yes, and regulators misjudged the incentives. Relying on each website to create the consent UI leads to a bad outcome for users.
mjevans 4y ago
Login. That should be the time at which cookies are authorized. If you have an account you also presumably agreed to the use of cookies or anything else to store the session data. For everything else, just say no.

Yes, the regulators screwed this up. It's the browser that decides to store a cookie or not. And if the browser UI sucks people can switch and go on with their lives.

atoav 4y ago

This is not about storing cookies or not alone, it is about consent to do so. And to give this consent the site has to tell me what it does and for which purposes it does that. Good, there could have been a standardized way to ask for that consent — but to me the way a site tries to trick you into consenting is yet another data point whether I want to be on this site.

zarzavat 4y ago
If you are not using incognito then you are getting tracked. These consent popups are close to useless because only good actors will obey the law, and as we’ve seen the vast majority of websites are somewhere between grey hat (asking but in a way that breaks the law) and black hat (not asking at all). What we need is better isolation at the browser and web protocol level. This is a technical problem, not a regulatory problem. You cannot regulate actors who don’t obey the law in the first place.
- atoav 4y ago
  Those who disobey the law can be sued. People just need to start doing it. The goal of the law is partly to make people who run websites aware of what they do with the data of their visitors. And that means for one part that they need to know what happens with things they embed in thwir site like google analytics and google fonts (for which someone has been sued already). But it also means that once website owners are informed they can decide wheter they want to ask people for their consent or whether they just remove those third party options. In reality many don't inform themselves at all and just slap a cookie thing onto their page, because that's what all the others are doing — just like they did with google analytics et al. Not knowing the law is not an excuse which will help you once someone sues you tho.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    There are not enough lawyers or court capacity to take the entire www to court, and even if there were, there's no way to enforce injunctions or collect on judgments when websites are operated in different countries. This is evidenced by the fact that the GDPR already made these actions illegal with huge penalties and it has had scarcely any effect. Most websites just ignore it completely as a "strange foreign law", including this one.
- iamacyborg 4y ago
  > If you are not using incognito then you are getting tracked You’re being tracked in incognito mode, too.
mormegil 4y ago
There is/was a standardized way similar to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P It was complicated and never caught on. I'd say the basic problem (visible also in the DNT fiasco) is that if you ask a user in a global and easy to understand way if he wants to accept tracking cookies, he'll say "no" once and for all, and that's it: you just disabled all tracking cookies everywhere. The only way it can work from the point of view of the tracking companies is to use these obnoxious dialogs everywhere: that way, at least some people will accept the cookies from lazyness.
jon-wood 4y ago
Dubbing this “cookie consent” is almost conspiracy level misguiding of the public by advertisers. It’s not about cookies at all, they’re fine, it’s about using those cookies to track people around the internet and sell their data. Frustratingly it seems to have worked. Recently I had to explain cookies vs tracking to a data protection analyst at work.
cheriot 4y ago
> Good, there could have been a standardized way to ask for that consent — but to me the way a site tries to trick you into consenting is yet another data point whether I want to be on this site. I get really annoyed at having to care. The economics for content sites are so poor I feel bad for a lot of them. > This is not about storing cookies or not alone, it is about consent to do so. Yes, and regulators misjudged the incentives. Relying on each website to create the consent UI leads to a bad outcome for users.

mjevans 4y ago

Login. That should be the time at which cookies are authorized. If you have an account you also presumably agreed to the use of cookies or anything else to store the session data. For everything else, just say no.