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I'm registering my elderly relatives for dmachoice.org, to prevent them from getting junk mail. These clowns create the problem and then have the audacity to ch
by thrtythreeforty 2y ago
I'm registering my elderly relatives for dmachoice.org, to prevent them from getting junk mail. These clowns create the problem and then have the audacity to charge you to be added to the opt out list. I was really skeptical about the GDPR when it was passed and I am now fully on board for an American version.
- shadowgovt 2y agoI'm still extremely skeptical of it because in practice it basically added a cookie banner to every every website I visit infrequently with no particular benefit to me. I'm just going to click "yes," stop asking.
- blooalien 2y ago> ... "it basically added a cookie banner to every every website I visit" ... Yeah, no. Hostile advertising companies added that cookie banner as a form of "malicious compliance" with the law purely to annoy everyone like a buncha spoil't little brats who didn't get their way, so now they're gonna make everyone suffer... If we get a similar law in the USA, you can expect to see annoyances just like it (and probably worse) on sites hosted here, too.
- thfuran 2y agoNot if we ban third-party ads.
- shadowgovt 2y agoAnd if the regulators didn't predict such compliance they should be replaced with competent actors in their jobs. That was the obvious outcome. What did people predict: site owners leaving money on the table? Who pays for operating the sites then?
- Aeolun 2y agoAll the sites that need advertising like that can just die off and leave the internet a better place.
- shadowgovt 2y agoDid we ever think that would be the end result of all this?
- schmidtleonard 2y agoWhen GDPR was first going through the public circuit I remember reading the proposed laws and being pleasantly surprised to find that they specifically called out and forbade the likely workarounds, including the obnoxious banners we now see everywhere. I would love to know what happened. Did the laws get "revised" to re-open the loophole? Was superseding legislation passed? Did the courts reject it? Are there enforcement issues?
- roenxi 2y agoThat sounds like a legal minefield - I would point out that GDPR-style legislation exists because the legislators don't trust the industry to assess what is reasonable. So the industry would be in a position where: 1) They aren't trusted to be reasonable about user consent. 2) They are only to take action when they judge it is reasonable to check user consent. It'd probably be a very rocky process to nail down what those words like "loophole" and "workaround" mean as the advertisers start abusing prescribed no-banner situations.
- p_l 2y agoTL;DR the enforcement simply lacks manpower, and the most egregious cases go to court which also takes time.
- chrismorgan 2y agoThe worst part is that it wasn’t even malicious compliance: the cookie banners they added seldom even satisfied law, in ways completely obvious if you just read the law (which is pretty easy reading, only a few thousand words for the relevant parts). I don’t understand why relevant commissions didn’t make more noise about that, because it was obvious that major players were deliberately poisoning public perception.
- brookst 2y agoCan you source your claim? Because it seems like it would create a competitive advantage for a non-hostile advertising company. Websites aren’t any happier about cookie banners than users are. If it’s just an emotional, spiteful reaction, the grownups should be able to make a fortune.
- blooalien 2y agoYou'd think there'd be some "competitive advantage" to be had, but when their entire industry is built upon tracking and profiling everyone they possibly can, they'll do anything they can, fighting tooth-and-nail to the very end against any legislation that somehow interferes with their tracking, even if it means resorting to childish and petty temper tantrums that further enshittify the web. What little "competition" exists in that industry all fully believe that building massive profiles on everyone is the only way to make any money at advertising. They've been allowed to get away with it for so long that they can't even remember there was a time when tracking everyone all the time everywhere wasn't even a thing (and yet advertisers still managed to advertise back then, somehow)...
- wahnfrieden 2y agoOther replier believes that competition is a system that works toward consumer needs and betterments. Advertising is extractive
- brookst 2y agoActually I thought I was clear in my framing that, if site owners are unhappy with cookie banners, it is unlikely that a conspiracy of ad networks would force them to accept the nuisance. The claim is that no sites value their user experience enough to pick an ad solution with a better experience. I doubt that claim.
- bombis 2y agoCompetition _is_ a system that works toward consumer needs and betterments. In advertising though, you are not the consumer.
- shadowgovt 2y agoThat heavily incentivizes me to advocate against any such law.
- dcsommer 2y agoePD in 2002 mandated cookie banners well before GDPR in 2018. But yes, point taken that well intentioned regulation can be poorly implemented and have negative repercussions.
- lolc 2y agoI know of no regulation that mandated cookie banners. I just know a lot of sites who chose to use banners because the operators are somewhere between weasely and malicous.
- adra 2y agoClearly you don't have a browser plugin that simply opts out of all cookie banners. Ultimately, the webs ites have a financial interest in malicious compliance, so you either work within the system as given or throw your hands in the air and let every and all sites rape your data.
- shadowgovt 2y agoYes, the second one. I don't really care; it's not "my" data. It's data about me. When I walk down the street and sometime sees me go by, those aren't my photons they caught. By analogy, same with my browsing history.
- rockskon 2y agoYou are the culmination of your life's experiences. Going by your definition, one could infer an individual has zero intrinsic ownership of any non-health data. Which I categorically object to.
- Aloisius 2y agoYou have ownership over your own memories and records. Other people also own their own memories and records - some of which may be about you. At least, this is how it was for most of human history. Now some people think they should be able to demand everyone destroy records about them. If it was possible, no doubt they'd also demand people destroy any memories about them as well.
- rockskon 2y agoThat's not how it's been for the bulk of modern history. What absolute absurdity. It's an ancap mentality taken to the notion of privacy.
- Zak 2y agoIt is, however worth at least considering restrictions on continuously following a person in public places and reporting all their observed activities to a third party. Of course there are practical limitations on that kind of physical surveillance. It's expensive, tends to attract attention, and even nation states can only do it to a few people at a time. Information technology allows it to scale to almost everyone, almost all the time, for a small fraction of a corporate budget. Perhaps it's worth at least considering restrictions on that.
- Aeolun 2y agoThe cookie banner is only there because the website in question uses non-functional cookies (e.g. targeted advertising)
- Aloisius 2y agoIt's gotten entirely out of hand. Most EU national government websites have cookie banners. Even the European Commission website has a cookie banner! This should have been implemented at the browser level. Let the browser generate a nice consistent UI to nag EU users when visiting websites about accepting cookies and let the rest of us opt out.
- almostnormal 2y agoThe standard for cookies should be updated with a way to include or retrieve a description of each cookie separately. Then, require sites to provide that description, and let users choose per cookie in the browser.
- Sander_Marechal 2y agoThat's nonsense. It's not about the cookies, it's about the data collection. You can use cookies without having to use a cookie banner by simply not gathering data you don't need. And if you do gather that data without using cookies you still need to ask for consent.
- dcow 2y agoI can tell you, with absolute certainty, that nobody knows how to implement the law or what it even means, legislators, lawyers, engineers alike. There was a good somewhere and now we're in hell.
- phatskat 2y agoAs someone who was helping to implement GDPR for clients when it took effect, it was a nightmare. We didn’t know exactly what to do, or when, or where, or to whom. The easiest solution for a lot of the implantations was “do the most so we don’t miss something, and pull back bits as we know more”.
- samtheprogram 2y agoI click no to all of them, but it would be really nice if the Do-Not-Track header essentially let you pick in advance — for you (0) or for me (1)
- rurban 2y agoNot just "really nice". It must be mandatory to respect it.
- d3VwsX 2y agoThe only hope I still have is for some kind of fully local LLM-driven "agent" browser that does the browsing for me, navigating search engines, cookie banners and showing me what it found, nothing else. Unfortunately entire businesses are built around preventing people from using bots, for obvious reasons, so the only obvious way forward to make browsing the web a better experience will also mean ending up on the wrong side of that battle.
- mola 2y agoNo,.all the companies running the sites chose to add a cookie banner. And you choose to keep going there
- shadowgovt 2y agoYes, and my life world be more convenient if this banner would go away or I could declare a universal preference. I miss the old Internet where nobody cared about their privacy.
- williamdclt 2y agonobody cared about their privacy because there was no widespread systematic effort to invade it. I don't care about my privacy in the street despite it being public because there's no-one following my every step taking note of where I go, how fast, what music I'm listening to, what I'm looking at... (although the astute reader will argue that this is less and less true, there's more and more tech tracking our activity in real life too)
- badgersnake 2y agoCookie banners are malicious compliance and the failure to do anything about them is indicative as to how much the EU cares about privacy vs how much they want to be seen to be caring about privacy.
- pjc50 2y agoThe problem is GDPR isn't prescriptive enough. That makes it ripe for "technically correct but really annoying" solutions. It also failed to actually ban ad tracking.
- moritonal 2y agoKey to note that the cookie banner fiasco wasn't GDPR, it was a separate policy that should be changed.
- account42 2y agoGood job rewarding those companies for adding the nag screen. I'm sure that will get them to stop.
- shadowgovt 2y agoIf by 'companies' you mean https://commission.europa.eu/ https://commission.europa.eu/ then sure.