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So . . . the EU drives regulation to enforce seeking consent as a mandatory step, followed by browsers like brave programmatically defeating the ability of comp
by DisjointedHunt 4y ago
So . . . the EU drives regulation to enforce seeking consent as a mandatory step, followed by browsers like brave programmatically defeating the ability of companies to seek consent? Two wrongs don't make a right.
What is the end game here, it's like watching dumb and dumber. I want a great web experience just like the next person, but not at the cost of jeopardizing the successful freemium model of the internet that has given billions of people access.
- imwillofficial 4y agoYou are the first person I’ve read. Ever. Sticking up for consent banners that nobody asked for.
- DisjointedHunt 4y agoPlease read my comment again. Comment banners are the consequence of regulation. I'd rather poke my eye out than stick up for them. What i'm calling out is the dangerous series of events over the past few years which have been rooted in good intent to preserve privacy, that seem to be having the fallout of destroying the web experience. [edit] I can't believe HN has turned into a reddit style downvote brigade so i'll just post my response to the below comments in this edit since i can't reply anymore <shrug> And you've made my point exceedingly clear[1] That pretty much is the ambiguity left up to the whims and fancies of the EU bureaucracy to enforce. According to noyb.eu , the entity behind famous decisions at the CJEU, consent IS INDEED required[2] for ANY cookies to be stored on a users device. It isn't about data collection , if some rando agency or court finds Github or HN use fingerprinting of user preferences (as an example) or are LIKELY TO. . . it is considered a breach. A French agency fined Google and Facebook heavily for merely providing a more complex refusal flow for cookies than the accept flow. [1] https://www.cnil.fr/en/cookies-cnil-fines-google-total-150-million-euros-and-facebook-60-million-euros-non-compliance https://www.cnil.fr/en/cookies-cnil-fines-google-total-150-m... [2] https://noyb.eu/en/project/cookie-banners#:~:text=Cookie%20banners%20are%20regulated%20under,needs%20to%20obtain%20valid%20consent https://noyb.eu/en/project/cookie-banners#:~:text=Cookie%20b....
- matthewmacleod 4y agoComment banners are the consequence of regulation. No, consent banners are a consequence of scummy companies trying to vacuum up your personal data for nefarious reasons. They are not required by any regulation, aside from in cases where a company is asking to use your data in non-essential ways.
- scarface74 4y agoand yet the companies still exist doing the same thing and web browsing is worse.
- imwillofficial 4y agoI hear brave fixed it
- MereInterest 4y agoConsent banners are definitively not required by the GDPR. Consent is only required for non-essential collection of user data, or for non-essential processing of user data. For example, Strava would not need consent to collect user GPS location, as that is core to the product that Strava provides to users. Hacker News would require consent to collect user GPS location, as user GPS location is not essential for posting links/comments. In addition, because consent is specific to a use of data and not to the collection of data, Strava would require additional consent in order to use that GPS data for advertising. The GDPR doesn't require consent pop-ups. Companies choose to add consent pop-ups when they exceed the minimum amount of personal data collection.
- scarface74 4y agoWell, no matter who you want to blame, it all started with a bunch of ignorant lawmakers who caused a series of events that made web browsing worse.
- MereInterest 4y ago
- Teandw 4y agoHe's not sticking up for it. He's pointing out a truth. For example, in countries like the UK, as a website owner I have a legal requirement to get consent. Brave in this example would be forcefully removing the ability for me to get the consent that I legally require. I don't believe in consent banners but that doesn't remove my legal requirements. I've got to stick to the law whether I like it or not.
- evandale 4y agoBrave is giving users the ability to automatically say no to your cookie banners. People who use Brave don't want to be tracked and will never consent to it.
- Teandw 4y agoYou're making a mass assumption based on your usage of Brave there. Most people I know who downloaded Brave (general people, not the YCombintor/tech power user types) initially got Brave purely because they wanted to earn tokens while browsing. They don't care about the tracking/ad blocking side of things.
- evandale 4y agoWow in that case Brave is going to be in for a real rude awakening when all their users go back to Chrome so they can see consent banners again.
- imwillofficial 4y agoThat’s funny you say that, because it’s 180 degrees from reality. Normal people don’t know what tokens are, much less care about earning them. Brave is popular for ad blocking.
- Teandw 4y agoWhich is funny considering that Brave is a for profit company and nearly all of their money comes from displaying ads. It's popular for blocking a thing that the company needs to survive, while not caring about all the websites they block ads on.
- gpm 4y agoThe EU didn't making seeking consent mandatory, they made tracking people without consent illegal (except to the extent that it's necessary for the service). These companies are perfectly able to simply not track people without displaying cookie banners. This is simply automating the process of ignoring the request for consent to track you. The result is (legally) that the website may not track you because it did not receive affirmative consent. That really is the end goal, to stop companies from tracking consumes like this while still allowing for legitimate business deals.
- DisjointedHunt 4y agoI'd respect those moves grounded in the argument for a universal human right to privacy were it not for the glaring exceptions made to the EUs own security agencies and God knows what else under the national security exception. Everyone in the industry tracking the privacy moves in GDPR acknowledges that far from improving privacy, they are intended to blunt US tech companies' success in the continent. And . . that's perfectly fine, i guess positioning it as a moral defense of privacy just doesn't sit well with me.
- matthewmacleod 4y agoEveryone in the industry tracking the privacy moves in GDPR acknowledges that far from improving privacy, they are intended to blunt US tech companies' success in the continent. No, this is by far the minority view and is held purely by people who are ignorant about the requirements and functionality of GDPR.
- DisjointedHunt 4y ago[flagged]
- denton-scratch 4y ago> As a neutral observer of a continent with such budding talent You don't seem to be very neutral.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago> the EU drives regulation to enforce seeking consent as a mandatory step EU doesn't enforce popups that take half page space though, web sites added them. > followed by browsers like brave programmatically defeating the ability of companies to seek consent? followed by the choice of the user to automatically deny consent to those asking for it using annoying popups. FTFY it's like ad blocking, I don't want to consent to data collection or see ads and I automatically deny the permission and block ads. It's a default, chosen by users, you can opt out, which in this case means you're opting in for choosing to which site give your consent.
- evandale 4y agoThe end game is not getting spammed by crap I don't want. I don't want to consent to any tracking and there's no need to ask me.
- vmind 4y agoThe likely endgames of 'no tracking' (accelerated by automating rejection rate up to 100%) are: - drastically reduced free content (see the rise of paywalls on most news sites) - an arms race to find other ways to track (see rise of cookieless tracking and retargetting approaches, first party cloaking, etc) Not to say the latter wouldn't always be there, and but fact is a good chunk of the web is free and stuffed with ads because that's the only way to stay afloat, people simply don't want to pay for content.
- scarface74 4y ago> drastically reduced free content (see the rise of paywalls on most news sites You act as if this is a bad thing. I’m all in favor of business models where I give them money and they give me goods and services
- ben_w 4y agoAnalytics info can be interesting and neat, but given how bad the adverts I see on Facebook are, and how badly wrong Twitter categorised me according to what I found by downloading all the data they stored on me, I don't think it's anything like as useful as its proponents say it is. (Except, possibly, for automatic bug tracking; but even then, the value is in the stack trace, not the personal info).
- pookha 4y agoDoesn't Brave block 3rd party cookies? What's the point of the banner? My cookie knowledge is entirely based on enterprise and small server-side web apps, but I assumed that 3rd party cookies were evil and allowed facebook\facebag's of the world to track people covertly. And not every webapp is going to use JSON web tokens so the ability to use first-party tokens is sort of a requirement for auth and session management
- scarface74 4y agoThe dumb part starts and ends with the 99 section 11 chapter GDPR whose only outcome was to make the web worse and had none of its intended affects.
- alanbernstein 4y agoIt's so simple: the browser should expose a user configuration setting, which can be used by any website to automatically answer whatever question the consent banner thinks it needs to ask. At the highest level, three settings: Ignore, Reject all, Accept all. More fine-grained settings could be standardized (conceivably), although I would be surprised if many people cared to use them.
- sushibowl 4y agoThis is one of the first ideas people tried, more than a decade ago before GDPR was even a thing. The Do Not Track header was proposed in 2009 and implemented only in Firefox. The problem is that advertisers don't want this solution, because they want you to accept all cookies and a single browser-wide config setting makes denying way too easy. so they just ignored the setting, and nothing ever came of it.
- alanbernstein 4y agoHmm, that's too bad. I guess we'll just have to make the browsers programmatically defeat the user-hostile websites!
- nsxwolf 4y agoI hate these banners. Often times, they pop up in a non-obvious location and cause the entire page to freeze - scrolling doesn't work, links and buttons don't work. I have force quit my browser on more than one occasion because I couldn't figure out there was a cookie banner on the screen. So, in your estimation, which side am I on - Dumb, or Dumber?
- thn-gap 4y agoHow is Brave's action wrong? It's the user who needs top enable the feature of "I don't want to consent ever, please ignore such requests". If this state was the normal, and later they were to stop blocking cookie banners that you explicitly chose to always reject, it would be seen like a huge harrassment from companies to the user. Maybe the end game is that we managed to realize what practices were beyond acceptable, and finally forbid them via legislation.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoI didn't consent, I use the DNT header. They ignore it. I ignore their banner and ude my right to reject tracking.