3 ms·

It's a bit like the EU thinking that by forcing websites to surface their advertising partners/personal data practices it will encourage people to visit less pr

by quitit 3y ago

It's a bit like the EU thinking that by forcing websites to surface their advertising partners/personal data practices it will encourage people to visit less privacy-invasive websites, when instead it's now rare to find a website that doesn't have the privacy click-through, making the web that little bit more tedious. Amusingly EU's favourite children epicgames.com and spotify.com have to show these pop-ups due to their data collection practices while "evil" apple doesn't have to show these pop-ups because they're not abusing visitor data. As for 3rd party app stores: Despite the EU's head-in-the-sand approach, I do expect that 3rd party stores will abuse direct access to customers to use dark patterns to exploit additional unwanted purchases, stymie refunds and make it difficult to unsubscribe. Why? Because this is what businesses such as Epic Games, New York Times and Spotify already do with their direct customers. It doesn't have to be malware to be a scam. People cheering for Epic Games seem to forget that just over a year ago Epic Games settled with the FTC for over half a billion dollars in fines for abusing their customers with predatory practices and invading the privacy of children(1). Side note: It's also rather sickening to see EU's DMA regulators such as Thierry Breton(2) using the marketing hashtag #freefortnite on their tweets. What a perfect demonstration of their lack of neutrality and promoting a company found to exploit its users. They clearly are not working in the interest of consumer protection, that's just a red herring for protectionism. (1) https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/fortnite-video-game-maker-epic-games-pay-more-half-billion-dollars-over-ftc-allegations https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/... (2) https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1766167580497117464 https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1766167580497117464

simion314 3y ago
I always decline the tracking from the websites so the EU laws had an effect giving me the option to decline. At my work we also did updates , for example purging the user data when they close their account. See changes happened, too bad that most websites decided to make the popups super evil and try to make it hard to decline, EU did not ask the websites to implement them like that, some other evil capitalists decided that screwing humans for a few dollars is worth it.
- quitit 3y ago
  I see this as a failure of the legislation and entirely foreseeable. That’s why I blame the EU because “evil capitalists” existed back then too. I use that example because if the EU wanted to encourage websites to not abuse user data, their legislation didn’t mandate that and the result we have today was entirely expected. Instead they should have legislated for that consumer protection directly. My point here is that the EU acted naively when they wrote that legislation and I see a repeat of this unwillingness to truly address the problem with the DMA - currently EU politicians are promoting the potential fringe benefits of the DMA while ignoring the much larger, much more probable consumer harms. Noting the FTC fine against Epic Games and Fortnite, certain EU politicians are even promoting one of those “evil capitalists”. It is plainly foreseeable how the DMA will directly hinder small developers and harm consumers, the only true winner from the DMA are large developers of well known software such as Microsoft and Spotify, whereby the DMA significantly tilts balance in their favour.
  - simion314 3y ago
    GDPR is not about websites or internet, it applies for everything, so the law should not dictate an UX. Be patient , slowly this popups will be declared illegal by the justice system , companies will pay the fines and will fix them. I think the IT / tech people need to decide on sme standards here and not have EU force one on them. There are some laws about age verification, this shit could have been solved by tech decades ago where you set the user age in the computer/phone OS when you create the account then the OS and browsers work together to ensure under 18 do not access adult websites or apps. Then concerned parents when buy a phone for the children and they setup their email/account they just enter the birthday and the OS/browser will have to do the work to filter the content. But the tech crowd was busy with other shit and conservatives/religious types will force us all to suffer the consequences and prove Google/Steam/YouTube ... my age
    - quitit 3y ago
      > Be patient.. It doesn't affect me on a personal level so it's not a discussion about idealism and having patience. What I'm describing is a symptom of failed and naive legislation. It's also an exceedingly slow legislature; the GDPR was finished in 2016 and implemented in 2018. Whatever the EU plans for it, it's already done. You don't need patience, you need acceptance. Per your comment: An often heard theme is that commercial entities should get ahead of the EU/other governmemts to stave off GDPR-like legislation. However this is not just naive to commercial operations, but also to politics: Once a government makes clear their intention to regulate a practice, businesses scale back their own plans to self-regulate, for the very simple reason that any solutions they would devise are now out of their hands. Whatever changes they implement would only be chance to align with the government's mandate. When we compare privacy protections invented by Apple versus those mandated by the GDPR we see extremely different approaches to the same problem, and Facebook's financials show that Apple's technological approaches have been far more effective, while also not projecting certain "protectionist" themes that are a recurring aspect of EU legislation (i.e. the politics side of introducing protectionism policies and mass surveillance while crying "won't somebody think of the consumers/children".) A final issue that I'll simply allude to is that many comments on HN are not just poorly researched, but absent knowledge of even recent events. Head in the clouds kind of stuff. Malware isn't hypothetical. Data collection corps such as Facebook and Google using side-loading to subvert OS-level protections/review processes isn't FUD, it's already happened.

by quitit 3y ago

simion314 3y ago

I always decline the tracking from the websites so the EU laws had an effect giving me the option to decline. At my work we also did updates , for example purging the user data when they close their account. See changes happened, too bad that most websites decided to make the popups super evil and try to make it hard to decline, EU did not ask the websites to implement them like that, some other evil capitalists decided that screwing humans for a few dollars is worth it.

quitit 3y ago
I see this as a failure of the legislation and entirely foreseeable. That’s why I blame the EU because “evil capitalists” existed back then too. I use that example because if the EU wanted to encourage websites to not abuse user data, their legislation didn’t mandate that and the result we have today was entirely expected. Instead they should have legislated for that consumer protection directly. My point here is that the EU acted naively when they wrote that legislation and I see a repeat of this unwillingness to truly address the problem with the DMA - currently EU politicians are promoting the potential fringe benefits of the DMA while ignoring the much larger, much more probable consumer harms. Noting the FTC fine against Epic Games and Fortnite, certain EU politicians are even promoting one of those “evil capitalists”. It is plainly foreseeable how the DMA will directly hinder small developers and harm consumers, the only true winner from the DMA are large developers of well known software such as Microsoft and Spotify, whereby the DMA significantly tilts balance in their favour.
- simion314 3y ago
  GDPR is not about websites or internet, it applies for everything, so the law should not dictate an UX. Be patient , slowly this popups will be declared illegal by the justice system , companies will pay the fines and will fix them. I think the IT / tech people need to decide on sme standards here and not have EU force one on them. There are some laws about age verification, this shit could have been solved by tech decades ago where you set the user age in the computer/phone OS when you create the account then the OS and browsers work together to ensure under 18 do not access adult websites or apps. Then concerned parents when buy a phone for the children and they setup their email/account they just enter the birthday and the OS/browser will have to do the work to filter the content. But the tech crowd was busy with other shit and conservatives/religious types will force us all to suffer the consequences and prove Google/Steam/YouTube ... my age
  - quitit 3y ago
    > Be patient.. It doesn't affect me on a personal level so it's not a discussion about idealism and having patience. What I'm describing is a symptom of failed and naive legislation. It's also an exceedingly slow legislature; the GDPR was finished in 2016 and implemented in 2018. Whatever the EU plans for it, it's already done. You don't need patience, you need acceptance. Per your comment: An often heard theme is that commercial entities should get ahead of the EU/other governmemts to stave off GDPR-like legislation. However this is not just naive to commercial operations, but also to politics: Once a government makes clear their intention to regulate a practice, businesses scale back their own plans to self-regulate, for the very simple reason that any solutions they would devise are now out of their hands. Whatever changes they implement would only be chance to align with the government's mandate. When we compare privacy protections invented by Apple versus those mandated by the GDPR we see extremely different approaches to the same problem, and Facebook's financials show that Apple's technological approaches have been far more effective, while also not projecting certain "protectionist" themes that are a recurring aspect of EU legislation (i.e. the politics side of introducing protectionism policies and mass surveillance while crying "won't somebody think of the consumers/children".) A final issue that I'll simply allude to is that many comments on HN are not just poorly researched, but absent knowledge of even recent events. Head in the clouds kind of stuff. Malware isn't hypothetical. Data collection corps such as Facebook and Google using side-loading to subvert OS-level protections/review processes isn't FUD, it's already happened.