14 ms·

Agree. How much corporate propaganda are people consuming that legislators are seen as wholly responsible for the bad behavior and malicious compliance actions

Agree. How much corporate propaganda are people consuming that legislators are seen as wholly responsible for the bad behavior and malicious compliance actions of corporations? What does it say about the relationship between businesses and consumers that the first response to this bad behavior is to shout "look what you made them do!" Seemingly it is everyone's fault except the bad actors themselves.

ragnese 3y ago
It's so depressing. Many of the people who are pointing the finger at the regulators for the annoying cookie banners don't actually see the web site/app *as* a bad actor. The fact that they had been tracking tons of extra data via cookies without their consent or knowledge was totally fine to them as long as it wasn't inconveniencing them in any way. The cookie banner is an inconvenience to their mindless consumption, so NOW it's a problem and they just don't care what the solution actually is as long as the thing goes away. I've seen this attitude from tech people, too, so it's not just a matter of tech ignorance or illiteracy.
- kortilla 3y ago
  > The cookie banner is an inconvenience to their mindless consumption, It’s an inconvenience to people who care about privacy and use browser configurations that don’t store state between visits. So now in an attempt to protect regular users, the law ended up hurting users that already cared. Additionally, the shadiest and incompetent sites still just track people with no cookie banner. So the law doesn’t really provide protection against uncooperative parties, whereas privacy technology does.
  - ragnese 3y ago
    > It’s an inconvenience to people who care about privacy and use browser configurations that don’t store state between visits. > > So now in an attempt to protect regular users, the law ended up hurting users that already cared. Fair point about the banners mostly "hurting" users who care about privacy (but, really though- how much does it really "hurt" you? I'm "hurt" more by the fact that I have to fold laundry several days a week). But, I take major issue with you saying that the LAW ended up hurting users. Companies are under no legal obligation to make those banners as obnoxious as they are or with so many dark patterns (I sometimes don't know if I'm even enabling or disabling tracking with the way they word it). That's squarely on the web site owners pulling that nonsense. > Additionally, the shadiest and incompetent sites still just track people with no cookie banner. So the law doesn’t really provide protection against uncooperative parties, whereas privacy technology does. I agree that the only/best way to protect yourself is via technology and not by relying on people obeying the law. However, if this is also an argument against having the law, it's an incredibly weak one. You can apply that logic to argue that NO laws are effective. People still murder even though it's illegal- must be a bad law, no?
    - nickpp 3y ago
      > Companies are under no legal obligation to make those banners as obnoxious as they are Actually every single lawyer we asked about implementing GDPR advised us to have one of those obnoxious banners. Because the law is so ambiguous and the penalties so high that is better to play it safe. And we have no ads nor tracking at all on our product website. You can ignore your lawyer's advice if you want, but it's a bit like a lawyer office ignoring my data security and backup advice: assuming a huge amount of risk.
      - ragnese 3y ago
        If you are using cookies for user preferences/settings, then they require consent. If you are only using cookies for session information (like a shopping cart), then you don't have to get consent. Your lawyers know this. Frankly, I doubt the veracity of this anecdote. But even so, I'm willing to bet that the lawyers in this story did not tell you that the banners have to cover half the screen and have ambiguous wording to intentionally confuse visitors to your site. When I say "obnoxious banner" I'm not being redundant: not all banners or popovers are "obnoxious".
        nickpp 3y ago
        Are you a lawyer? Are you willing to assume the liability I may incur if I follow your advice? Or are you at least a business owner/manager who's had to deal with this crap? Or are you in the peanut gallery willing to believe that there is some conspiracy where all websites have suddenly decided to obliterate their user's UX when GDPR appeared just because they are evil? I live in the EU and I can tell you: ALL banners/popups are obnoxious. They ALL get in my way when I want to do something entirely different. As a (non ad/user-tracking) business I would never afflict them on my users if I had a choice. The productivity loss here in EU since the GDPR would be staggering - if there was much productivity to begin with, of course.
  - account42 3y ago
    The GDRP is about all kinds of tracking, of which things you can block locally at the browser level is only one part. So yes, even those users that already cared enough to block/discard cookies benefit.
- unmole 3y ago
  > don't actually see the web site/app as a bad Some of these bad actors actors with annoying cookie banners: https://gdpr.eu/ https://gdpr.eu/ https://european-union.europa.eu/ https://european-union.europa.eu/ https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en
  - depressedpanda 3y ago
    I only got a cookie banner on the first of those links, and as far as cookie banners go it wasn't very annoying; I clicked "no" and it went away immediately.
  - ragnese 3y ago
    I only got cookie banners on the first two links and they were extremely unobtrusive. You did not make the point you had hoped to make.
- m463 3y ago
  > totally fine this is not true. It's just that most people are powerless to fight against the dark pattern onslaught.
throwawaysleep 3y ago
Many of us had no real problem with the ad-supported web in the first place. I was happy with the status quo. So yes, I do blame the government as I would be fine returning to the prior state.
- MattHeard 3y ago
  "I would like website operators to assume that I consent to being tracked, so I'm annoyed that website operators are not allowed to assume that everybody consents to being tracked."
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- alistairSH 3y ago
  A site can serve ads without tracking (and the banner) - the ads just couldn't be targeted at individuals. Instead they'd have to guess what ad was appropriate ("Rolling Stone" could serve everybody ads for Taylor Swift's latest album without a banner, etc).
  - LunaSea 3y ago
    This means you get less money for it and can't survive due to the lesser revenue.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      This is contrafactual. Many things survived on exact that model before hyper targetted ads. And besides, with targetted ads the middle men take most of the cut.
      - LunaSea 3y ago
lynx23 3y ago
If it only were that simple. When the GDPR came out, a lot of confusion and misunderstanding ensued. Not only regarding the damn cookie banner. Even totally legitimate health-care providers started to collect signatures to be on the safe side. I still rememeber receiving a basic GDPR training where we were told that opt-out/signing is only necessary if the entity is planning to do weird stuff with your data. IOW, if someone wants you to sign, they plan a bad move. Then my bank wanted a signature. And a month later, one of my healthcare providers wanted a signature. After a chat with him, I learnt that his lawyer told him to collect the signatures just in case, and made him believe that if someone doesn't sign, that is a problem. So now we have this situation where providers were trained to play the GDPR in such a way that they will never have a problem, no matter what they actually do with the data. And consumers are pissed because they are made to sign things which essentially reduce their rights... And if someone (like me) thinks the EU did a half-assed job there, the downvotes rain in.
- soco 3y ago
  The same people also complain they cannot use by default said websites unless they share all their personal data with them. Half-assed, indeed the measure is. But it also reflects the majority thinking, unfortunately. So unless there's some popular pressure to full-ass the measure, we will still have banners and misused personal data.
- orwin 3y ago
  I kinda hate saying this, but Microsoft (or at least github) got it right in a week. Some OSS publishers also got it right, like nexedi, and some i'm sightly upset with (gitlab) but it is true that for the commercial internet it seems to be invasive. I do not use the commercial internet much, and like any person with greasemonkey, i took a rainy afternoon to remove the most annoying banners (i think now i use a plugin that does it for me).
  - lynx23 3y ago
    The fact that you have to use a plugin or other thecnical remedies to fix the cookie banner situation is all the proof we need to see that the EU totally fucked up. It is easy to declare that you just need to install this or that to get a obstruction-free internet again. But it is also very very elitist. Not even 1% of the population is truly capable of handling that.
username332211 3y ago
The funny thing is it's not just corporations. When you open the German state railways' website, somehow you get a GDPR overlay, When you open the German revenue agency's website, you get greeted by a cookie banner on top. I call upon all German users of this website to write to their MPs! Obviously the German civil service is a bad actor! The German deep state is plotting to discredit our beloved eurocrats and must be shut down! Den Sumpf trockenlegen!
- nolok 3y ago
  > I call upon all German users of this website to write to their legislators! Obviously the German civil service is a bad actor! The German deep state must be shut down! I understand the joke you're trying to make but you clearly don't understand the relation between germans and privacy/tracking regulation to think this makes sense.
  - username332211 3y ago
    It's not supposed to make sense, it's supposed to show the absurd position of the post I'm replying to. The less it makes sense, the better. And I only picked Germany, because it's one of the few EU countries where stuff like that is rigorously enforced. In the rest of the EU, everything unrelated to the common market and/or getting money from the EU is at best haphazardly enforced. If you want to, check out france.fr, a website maintained by an agency of the French tourism ministry. (After disabling the 3 dozens of annoyance blocking extensions everyone must use nowadays, of course.) What do you see? A giant cookie overlay. Égoutter le marais!
    - musiciangames 3y ago
      I get no overlay on france.fr
      - username332211 3y ago
        Me neither, unless I disable ad blockers and anti-annoyance extensions.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Apple is doing the same thing, passive-aggressively doing things like removing support for pinning webapps / PWAs / whatever they're called to your home screen, then backtracking after backlash. Or Microsoft with their browser choice screen or Windows releases without media player. And even those aren't as bad as the malicious compliance of cookie banners.
raydev 3y ago
> How much corporate propaganda are people consuming that legislators are seen as wholly responsible for the bad behavior and malicious compliance actions of corporations Why do I need to be "consuming corporate propaganda" when I just hate that I need to dismiss banners on every news website, when I didn't have to before the regulation? I don't care about being tracked. But now that all websites need to cover their asses in response to regulation, I'm forced to figure out which button I need to click on to read content, and these websites don't even appear to save my preferences whether I agree to be tracked or not. Objectively, the outcome of this regulation is that my experience is worse. Are the companies bad actors? Sure! Sounds like the EU should account for companies' bad behavior instead of forcing the internet to be more annoying.
- Jensson 3y ago
  Get a plugin to click that button for you, I got one and haven't seen such a banner in a really long time now.
  - aurareturn 3y ago
    Any iOS plugins that work?
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  The experience you describe is the fault of websites which chose to make things that way. The article goes into more detail on this point: There Is No Cookie Banner Law. It's important to note that we didn't have to go through the banners after the law, either. We only had to go through them after website operators intentionally picked the most disruptive and annoying popup to serve us. We can blame them. They chose to add it when they could have legally not added anything at all. It's like the situation described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39742766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39742766
  - raydev 3y ago
    Again, from the perspective of users, the experience got worse post-regulation. > The experience you describe is the fault of websites which chose to make things that way. I don't disagree. But they were less annoying before. So make them go back to being less annoying.
webworker 3y ago
Again, this should have been a >browser feature< instead of a website feature. I trust Safari and Firefox WAY MORE than I trust the website's owners to actually block cookies and protect privacy, as well as implement this in a better UX. The proper way to have done this would have been to go to the W3C or WHATWG and proposed an extension to HTML for sites to define an opt-in manifest or something similar.
- mafuy 3y ago
  A feature that lets the browser tell websites "do-not-track the user"? From my knowledge of history, I'm afraid that would not work at all!
  - webworker 3y ago
    More like a content blocker. The websites can ask, but there's not guarantee the user will accept. Really no different than browsers asking to show popups beforehand.

ragnese 3y ago

It's so depressing. Many of the people who are pointing the finger at the regulators for the annoying cookie banners don't actually see the web site/app *as* a bad actor. The fact that they had been tracking tons of extra data via cookies without their consent or knowledge was totally fine to them as long as it wasn't inconveniencing them in any way. The cookie banner is an inconvenience to their mindless consumption, so NOW it's a problem and they just don't care what the solution actually is as long as the thing goes away. I've seen this attitude from tech people, too, so it's not just a matter of tech ignorance or illiteracy.

kortilla 3y ago
> The cookie banner is an inconvenience to their mindless consumption, It’s an inconvenience to people who care about privacy and use browser configurations that don’t store state between visits. So now in an attempt to protect regular users, the law ended up hurting users that already cared. Additionally, the shadiest and incompetent sites still just track people with no cookie banner. So the law doesn’t really provide protection against uncooperative parties, whereas privacy technology does.
- ragnese 3y ago
  > It’s an inconvenience to people who care about privacy and use browser configurations that don’t store state between visits. > > So now in an attempt to protect regular users, the law ended up hurting users that already cared. Fair point about the banners mostly "hurting" users who care about privacy (but, really though- how much does it really "hurt" you? I'm "hurt" more by the fact that I have to fold laundry several days a week). But, I take major issue with you saying that the LAW ended up hurting users. Companies are under no legal obligation to make those banners as obnoxious as they are or with so many dark patterns (I sometimes don't know if I'm even enabling or disabling tracking with the way they word it). That's squarely on the web site owners pulling that nonsense. > Additionally, the shadiest and incompetent sites still just track people with no cookie banner. So the law doesn’t really provide protection against uncooperative parties, whereas privacy technology does. I agree that the only/best way to protect yourself is via technology and not by relying on people obeying the law. However, if this is also an argument against having the law, it's an incredibly weak one. You can apply that logic to argue that NO laws are effective. People still murder even though it's illegal- must be a bad law, no?
  - nickpp 3y ago
    > Companies are under no legal obligation to make those banners as obnoxious as they are Actually every single lawyer we asked about implementing GDPR advised us to have one of those obnoxious banners. Because the law is so ambiguous and the penalties so high that is better to play it safe. And we have no ads nor tracking at all on our product website. You can ignore your lawyer's advice if you want, but it's a bit like a lawyer office ignoring my data security and backup advice: assuming a huge amount of risk.
    - ragnese 3y ago
      If you are using cookies for user preferences/settings, then they require consent. If you are only using cookies for session information (like a shopping cart), then you don't have to get consent. Your lawyers know this. Frankly, I doubt the veracity of this anecdote. But even so, I'm willing to bet that the lawyers in this story did not tell you that the banners have to cover half the screen and have ambiguous wording to intentionally confuse visitors to your site. When I say "obnoxious banner" I'm not being redundant: not all banners or popovers are "obnoxious".
      - nickpp 3y ago
        Are you a lawyer? Are you willing to assume the liability I may incur if I follow your advice? Or are you at least a business owner/manager who's had to deal with this crap? Or are you in the peanut gallery willing to believe that there is some conspiracy where all websites have suddenly decided to obliterate their user's UX when GDPR appeared just because they are evil? I live in the EU and I can tell you: ALL banners/popups are obnoxious. They ALL get in my way when I want to do something entirely different. As a (non ad/user-tracking) business I would never afflict them on my users if I had a choice. The productivity loss here in EU since the GDPR would be staggering - if there was much productivity to begin with, of course.
- account42 3y ago
  The GDRP is about all kinds of tracking, of which things you can block locally at the browser level is only one part. So yes, even those users that already cared enough to block/discard cookies benefit.
unmole 3y ago
> don't actually see the web site/app as a bad Some of these bad actors actors with annoying cookie banners: https://gdpr.eu/ https://gdpr.eu/ https://european-union.europa.eu/ https://european-union.europa.eu/ https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en
- depressedpanda 3y ago
  I only got a cookie banner on the first of those links, and as far as cookie banners go it wasn't very annoying; I clicked "no" and it went away immediately.
- ragnese 3y ago
  I only got cookie banners on the first two links and they were extremely unobtrusive. You did not make the point you had hoped to make.
m463 3y ago
> totally fine this is not true. It's just that most people are powerless to fight against the dark pattern onslaught.

throwawaysleep 3y ago

Many of us had no real problem with the ad-supported web in the first place. I was happy with the status quo. So yes, I do blame the government as I would be fine returning to the prior state.

MattHeard 3y ago
"I would like website operators to assume that I consent to being tracked, so I'm annoyed that website operators are not allowed to assume that everybody consents to being tracked."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
alistairSH 3y ago
A site can serve ads without tracking (and the banner) - the ads just couldn't be targeted at individuals. Instead they'd have to guess what ad was appropriate ("Rolling Stone" could serve everybody ads for Taylor Swift's latest album without a banner, etc).
- LunaSea 3y ago
  This means you get less money for it and can't survive due to the lesser revenue.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    This is contrafactual. Many things survived on exact that model before hyper targetted ads. And besides, with targetted ads the middle men take most of the cut.
    - LunaSea 3y ago

lynx23 3y ago

If it only were that simple. When the GDPR came out, a lot of confusion and misunderstanding ensued. Not only regarding the damn cookie banner. Even totally legitimate health-care providers started to collect signatures to be on the safe side. I still rememeber receiving a basic GDPR training where we were told that opt-out/signing is only necessary if the entity is planning to do weird stuff with your data. IOW, if someone wants you to sign, they plan a bad move. Then my bank wanted a signature. And a month later, one of my healthcare providers wanted a signature. After a chat with him, I learnt that his lawyer told him to collect the signatures just in case, and made him believe that if someone doesn't sign, that is a problem. So now we have this situation where providers were trained to play the GDPR in such a way that they will never have a problem, no matter what they actually do with the data. And consumers are pissed because they are made to sign things which essentially reduce their rights... And if someone (like me) thinks the EU did a half-assed job there, the downvotes rain in.

soco 3y ago
The same people also complain they cannot use by default said websites unless they share all their personal data with them. Half-assed, indeed the measure is. But it also reflects the majority thinking, unfortunately. So unless there's some popular pressure to full-ass the measure, we will still have banners and misused personal data.
orwin 3y ago
I kinda hate saying this, but Microsoft (or at least github) got it right in a week. Some OSS publishers also got it right, like nexedi, and some i'm sightly upset with (gitlab) but it is true that for the commercial internet it seems to be invasive. I do not use the commercial internet much, and like any person with greasemonkey, i took a rainy afternoon to remove the most annoying banners (i think now i use a plugin that does it for me).
- lynx23 3y ago
  The fact that you have to use a plugin or other thecnical remedies to fix the cookie banner situation is all the proof we need to see that the EU totally fucked up. It is easy to declare that you just need to install this or that to get a obstruction-free internet again. But it is also very very elitist. Not even 1% of the population is truly capable of handling that.

username332211 3y ago

The funny thing is it's not just corporations. When you open the German state railways' website, somehow you get a GDPR overlay, When you open the German revenue agency's website, you get greeted by a cookie banner on top. I call upon all German users of this website to write to their MPs! Obviously the German civil service is a bad actor! The German deep state is plotting to discredit our beloved eurocrats and must be shut down! Den Sumpf trockenlegen!

nolok 3y ago
> I call upon all German users of this website to write to their legislators! Obviously the German civil service is a bad actor! The German deep state must be shut down! I understand the joke you're trying to make but you clearly don't understand the relation between germans and privacy/tracking regulation to think this makes sense.
- username332211 3y ago
  It's not supposed to make sense, it's supposed to show the absurd position of the post I'm replying to. The less it makes sense, the better. And I only picked Germany, because it's one of the few EU countries where stuff like that is rigorously enforced. In the rest of the EU, everything unrelated to the common market and/or getting money from the EU is at best haphazardly enforced. If you want to, check out france.fr, a website maintained by an agency of the French tourism ministry. (After disabling the 3 dozens of annoyance blocking extensions everyone must use nowadays, of course.) What do you see? A giant cookie overlay. Égoutter le marais!
  - musiciangames 3y ago
    I get no overlay on france.fr
    - username332211 3y ago
      Me neither, unless I disable ad blockers and anti-annoyance extensions.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

Apple is doing the same thing, passive-aggressively doing things like removing support for pinning webapps / PWAs / whatever they're called to your home screen, then backtracking after backlash. Or Microsoft with their browser choice screen or Windows releases without media player. And even those aren't as bad as the malicious compliance of cookie banners.

raydev 3y ago

> How much corporate propaganda are people consuming that legislators are seen as wholly responsible for the bad behavior and malicious compliance actions of corporations Why do I need to be "consuming corporate propaganda" when I just hate that I need to dismiss banners on every news website, when I didn't have to before the regulation? I don't care about being tracked. But now that all websites need to cover their asses in response to regulation, I'm forced to figure out which button I need to click on to read content, and these websites don't even appear to save my preferences whether I agree to be tracked or not. Objectively, the outcome of this regulation is that my experience is worse. Are the companies bad actors? Sure! Sounds like the EU should account for companies' bad behavior instead of forcing the internet to be more annoying.

Jensson 3y ago
Get a plugin to click that button for you, I got one and haven't seen such a banner in a really long time now.
- aurareturn 3y ago
  Any iOS plugins that work?
ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
The experience you describe is the fault of websites which chose to make things that way. The article goes into more detail on this point: There Is No Cookie Banner Law. It's important to note that we didn't have to go through the banners after the law, either. We only had to go through them after website operators intentionally picked the most disruptive and annoying popup to serve us. We can blame them. They chose to add it when they could have legally not added anything at all. It's like the situation described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39742766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39742766
- raydev 3y ago
  Again, from the perspective of users, the experience got worse post-regulation. > The experience you describe is the fault of websites which chose to make things that way. I don't disagree. But they were less annoying before. So make them go back to being less annoying.

webworker 3y ago

Again, this should have been a >browser feature< instead of a website feature. I trust Safari and Firefox WAY MORE than I trust the website's owners to actually block cookies and protect privacy, as well as implement this in a better UX. The proper way to have done this would have been to go to the W3C or WHATWG and proposed an extension to HTML for sites to define an opt-in manifest or something similar.

mafuy 3y ago
A feature that lets the browser tell websites "do-not-track the user"? From my knowledge of history, I'm afraid that would not work at all!
- webworker 3y ago
  More like a content blocker. The websites can ask, but there's not guarantee the user will accept. Really no different than browsers asking to show popups beforehand.