7 ms·

Maybe the intrusiveness and overreaching was just fundamental consumer protections all along.

tinus_hn 4y ago
But probably the truth is somewhere in between, like most of the time.
ilyt 4y ago
Oh, no, there is definitely some questionable overreach in regulations, the most known example to the outside is probably just how shittily the "cookie law" was written, good intentions with law that made the intentions irrelevant as implementation just trained users to click the stupid button and get on with their day. And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel...
- tgv 4y ago
  The cookie law wasn't half as shitty as the lazy ways companies adhere to it. But even that I'll take any day over the time before the cookie law (which, BTW, is much more extensive than just regulating cookies).
  - tempestn 4y ago
    If a law results in companies taking actions that annoy and impede hundreds of millions of people in aggregate, there's something wrong with the law. Governments need to consider the actual effects when they write laws, not what the effects would be in an ideal world.
    - throwarayda 4y ago
      The law doesn't result in the companies taking actions that annoy, that is the decision of the company. Why do you absolve the company of any and all responsibility?
    - ben_w 4y ago
      The law causes malicious compliance therefore it's a bad law? Well, sure. However, quite a lot of the websites aren't actually in compliance in the first place. For example, this Christmas I had to remind a company that me placing an order was not permission for them to email me a survey asking how good the delivery was — customers aren't a free QA team.
      - tempestn 4y ago
        A law that results in negative outcomes outweighing the positive ones is a bad law, yes.
    - agjmills 4y ago
      Like all US tax law?
      - tempestn 4y ago
        A lot of tax law is bad, yes. I certainly wouldn't say all though.
  - pishpash 4y ago
    Maybe they should have worked out some basic scenarios and written the law with those in mind?
    - ilyt 4y ago
      That what appears to what happened with GDPR, it is much more sensible and covers the common "workarounds" of making the reject harder or blocking the site content if you reject
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel..." You have to start somewhere and go step by step, if you want to solve huge problems. Who would pay for an infrastructure for EVs, when there are no EVs around? Chicken and egg problem. There is many crazy shit the EU has done, like the famous regulation on how cucumbers are supposed to bend exactly, which they abolished by now, but still once a month, the whole parliament and stuff moves from Strasbourg to Bruessel - and back, because they cannot settle one one place to be, but the slight push for renewable energy would not be on my list of big faults, even if it is inconsistent.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Putting money in infrastructure so customer sees it's cheaper to use EVs and just buys it is fine, but ban on ICE car sales is not "slight push".
    - hutzlibu 4y ago
      Given the size of the problem climate change, it is a slight push, especially since the sales ban is supposed to start in 2035.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Who would pay for an infrastructure for EVs, when there are no EVs around? The owners, obviously. You think we installed gas stations before we had cars?
    - noirbot 4y ago
      But an ICE car is an obvious improvement in both cost and usability to a horse-drawn carriage. Half of the value of an EV is that it's cheaper and easier to refuel. Making everyone who'd want one pay thousands to install infrastructure for them removes a lot of the reason you'd ever buy one, since it's otherwise essentially the same as an ICE car in terms of usage. If anything, right now, an EV is literally a worse car to an equivalent ICE in terms of what it's capable of. The reasons you'd have one is either general environmental altruism or because it'll be cheaper over the long term to own one.
- FL410 4y ago
  I trust you are aware that a very very small portion of aviation fuel burned is leaded (mostly just small general aviation aircraft)
- Poppys 4y ago
  If companies had respected the Do Not Track and browser vendors had made it easier to adopt we wouldn't have ended up with the situation we are in now.
  - resonious 4y ago
    If we really cared about tracking and privacy, browsers would just disable 3rd party cookies (or make it easy to disable cookies). It's full-on insane to use the law to force every website developer to add their own cookie banner when we could just change the browser and be done with it.
    - Yujf 4y ago
      Or, the website could just not track you and thus not require a cookie banner?
      - resonious 4y ago
        They could, but ultimately they want to track us. People also want to perform CSRF attacks. So what do we do? Make a law against CSRF? Or change the browsers to make it much harder?
        still_grokking 4y ago
        You've just said: > It's full-on insane to use the law to force every website developer to add their own cookie banner […] Which is obvious FUD. And this comment now makes it clear that you actually knew that you're spreading FUD.
    - input_sh 4y ago
      > browsers would just disable 3rd party cookies (or make it easy to disable cookies) Firefox has that built into its tracking protection. I don't know what's it set to by default, but it took me three clicks to reach the setting. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/third-party-cookies-firefox-tracking-protection https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/third-party-cookies-fir...
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel... To be clear, normal planes don't run on leaded fuel. Avgas, which is often leaded, is used in small propellor planes. Also, these seem, er, totally unrelated? The EU could ban leaded fuel tomorrow, and arguably should; this would lead to the grounding of a small number of small planes. But it doesn't have a lot to do with cars.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  What's wrong with "the cookie law"? If a website wants to spy on you it needs to make that at least very clear to the user. Nobody likes "cookie banners". But those banners are just a result of the fact that almost all web sites want to spy on their users, and sell the this way collected data. If you don't do that you don't need any banner. (Does HN has a cookie banner? Does for example https://noyb.eu/en https://noyb.eu/en has a banner? Does Wikipedia has a banner? Go figure.)
still_grokking 4y ago
Partly. But it's wildly mixed with market protection mechanisms, and quite some pure bureaucratic craziness. And it's not like you couldn't buy worst "chinesium" in the EU. On the other hand they will "protect" you from buying useful stuff… The basic rules and guiding principles are at least customer friendly. (And we usually don't wait until something breaks in terrible ways. We try to enforce high standards early on. But like said, often the rules are only there to protection EU vendors and their markets in the end).

But probably the truth is somewhere in between, like most of the time.

ilyt 4y ago

Oh, no, there is definitely some questionable overreach in regulations, the most known example to the outside is probably just how shittily the "cookie law" was written, good intentions with law that made the intentions irrelevant as implementation just trained users to click the stupid button and get on with their day. And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel...

tgv 4y ago
The cookie law wasn't half as shitty as the lazy ways companies adhere to it. But even that I'll take any day over the time before the cookie law (which, BTW, is much more extensive than just regulating cookies).
- tempestn 4y ago
  If a law results in companies taking actions that annoy and impede hundreds of millions of people in aggregate, there's something wrong with the law. Governments need to consider the actual effects when they write laws, not what the effects would be in an ideal world.
  - throwarayda 4y ago
    The law doesn't result in the companies taking actions that annoy, that is the decision of the company. Why do you absolve the company of any and all responsibility?
  - ben_w 4y ago
    The law causes malicious compliance therefore it's a bad law? Well, sure. However, quite a lot of the websites aren't actually in compliance in the first place. For example, this Christmas I had to remind a company that me placing an order was not permission for them to email me a survey asking how good the delivery was — customers aren't a free QA team.
    - tempestn 4y ago
      A law that results in negative outcomes outweighing the positive ones is a bad law, yes.
  - agjmills 4y ago
    Like all US tax law?
    - tempestn 4y ago
      A lot of tax law is bad, yes. I certainly wouldn't say all though.
- pishpash 4y ago
  Maybe they should have worked out some basic scenarios and written the law with those in mind?
  - ilyt 4y ago
    That what appears to what happened with GDPR, it is much more sensible and covers the common "workarounds" of making the reject harder or blocking the site content if you reject
hutzlibu 4y ago
"And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel..." You have to start somewhere and go step by step, if you want to solve huge problems. Who would pay for an infrastructure for EVs, when there are no EVs around? Chicken and egg problem. There is many crazy shit the EU has done, like the famous regulation on how cucumbers are supposed to bend exactly, which they abolished by now, but still once a month, the whole parliament and stuff moves from Strasbourg to Bruessel - and back, because they cannot settle one one place to be, but the slight push for renewable energy would not be on my list of big faults, even if it is inconsistent.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Putting money in infrastructure so customer sees it's cheaper to use EVs and just buys it is fine, but ban on ICE car sales is not "slight push".
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    Given the size of the problem climate change, it is a slight push, especially since the sales ban is supposed to start in 2035.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Who would pay for an infrastructure for EVs, when there are no EVs around? The owners, obviously. You think we installed gas stations before we had cars?
  - noirbot 4y ago
    But an ICE car is an obvious improvement in both cost and usability to a horse-drawn carriage. Half of the value of an EV is that it's cheaper and easier to refuel. Making everyone who'd want one pay thousands to install infrastructure for them removes a lot of the reason you'd ever buy one, since it's otherwise essentially the same as an ICE car in terms of usage. If anything, right now, an EV is literally a worse car to an equivalent ICE in terms of what it's capable of. The reasons you'd have one is either general environmental altruism or because it'll be cheaper over the long term to own one.
FL410 4y ago
I trust you are aware that a very very small portion of aviation fuel burned is leaded (mostly just small general aviation aircraft)
Poppys 4y ago
If companies had respected the Do Not Track and browser vendors had made it easier to adopt we wouldn't have ended up with the situation we are in now.
- resonious 4y ago
  If we really cared about tracking and privacy, browsers would just disable 3rd party cookies (or make it easy to disable cookies). It's full-on insane to use the law to force every website developer to add their own cookie banner when we could just change the browser and be done with it.
  - Yujf 4y ago
    Or, the website could just not track you and thus not require a cookie banner?
    - resonious 4y ago
      They could, but ultimately they want to track us. People also want to perform CSRF attacks. So what do we do? Make a law against CSRF? Or change the browsers to make it much harder?
      - still_grokking 4y ago
        You've just said: > It's full-on insane to use the law to force every website developer to add their own cookie banner […] Which is obvious FUD. And this comment now makes it clear that you actually knew that you're spreading FUD.
  - input_sh 4y ago
    > browsers would just disable 3rd party cookies (or make it easy to disable cookies) Firefox has that built into its tracking protection. I don't know what's it set to by default, but it took me three clicks to reach the setting. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/third-party-cookies-firefox-tracking-protection https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/third-party-cookies-fir...
rsynnott 4y ago
> And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel... To be clear, normal planes don't run on leaded fuel. Avgas, which is often leaded, is used in small propellor planes. Also, these seem, er, totally unrelated? The EU could ban leaded fuel tomorrow, and arguably should; this would lead to the grounding of a small number of small planes. But it doesn't have a lot to do with cars.
still_grokking 4y ago
What's wrong with "the cookie law"? If a website wants to spy on you it needs to make that at least very clear to the user. Nobody likes "cookie banners". But those banners are just a result of the fact that almost all web sites want to spy on their users, and sell the this way collected data. If you don't do that you don't need any banner. (Does HN has a cookie banner? Does for example https://noyb.eu/en https://noyb.eu/en has a banner? Does Wikipedia has a banner? Go figure.)

still_grokking 4y ago

Partly. But it's wildly mixed with market protection mechanisms, and quite some pure bureaucratic craziness. And it's not like you couldn't buy worst "chinesium" in the EU. On the other hand they will "protect" you from buying useful stuff… The basic rules and guiding principles are at least customer friendly. (And we usually don't wait until something breaks in terrible ways. We try to enforce high standards early on. But like said, often the rules are only there to protection EU vendors and their markets in the end).