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European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. The implementation could of course

European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. The implementation could of course be better but the real issue is the scummy web devs choosing to make it as annoying as possible instead of taking the more sensible decision to not have 150 trackers on every page. >> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship. Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.

microgpt 4mo ago
Website operators hate these cookies popups because they make their website more annoying and make me more likely to press the back button and click on a different website. As it should be. This incentivizes them to stop tracking me.
- dminik 4mo ago
  Why then do they make the most annoying, user-hostile dark pattern cookie banners they can come up with? No, website operators hate that they have to either stop spamming thousands of tracker scripts or put up a banner. They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
  - dgellow 4mo ago
    Most of them don’t care and just integrate whatever is the most common cookie banner widget because their legal team asked them to
  - anonzzzies 4mo ago
    Yeah, that's more the point; in discussions with clients I very often get asked how far we can go without any consent. Most companies want all the privacy ignoring stuff and they don't want to tell their users about it.
    - microgpt 4mo ago
      Realistically you won't be caught analyzing server-side logs of things the client is doing anyway, even if you don't follow GDPR rules with those logs. But they want Google Analytics, right?
- sensanaty 4mo ago
  The solution to that one is pretty simple, simply don't collect information you don't need, and you can avoid the banner altogether! Github manages to not have banners, it's not because of magic.
- goobatrooba 4mo ago
  There is no obligation to put a banner of you don't sell your users' data to third parties. The law is very clear that your don't need it for period technical cookies, so it's really always and every time solely about tracking and advertisement money.
  - microgpt 4mo ago
    You do need it for analytics though, or any other non-essential purpose. You could probably argue self-hosted, privacy-preserving analytics is a "legitimate business purpose" so doesn't need consent. AFAIK it's because you're sending user data to Google that you normally need consent for GA.
    - sensanaty 3mo ago
      [dead]
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
ajsnigrutin 4mo ago
99% of the people just click accept and go through. This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.
- sensanaty 4mo ago
  Cookies have literally nothing to do with GDPR or the ePrivacy directive. It is mentioned I think twice total in both documents as an example of how user data is persisted and tracked across domains, but ultimately the mechanism is irrelevant.
- kalleboo 3mo ago
  You mean 96% click do not allow and go through https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o... > This could be solved on the client side GDPR legally prohibits tracking in general, not cookies specifically. Advertisers use fingerprinting more than cookies these days already, even if browsers removed cookie support altogether it wouldn't change anything.
grayhatter 4mo ago
So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve? I assume you're pretty well read up on matters of privacy, right? So you have a better awareness and understanding. But do you believe the average person does? Or would you assume that the average person has either been trained to ignore the banner, automatically consent to more invasive tracking, or is generally more confused about why the banner exists, or what it does? The cookie consent law is the dumbest application of an attempt to improve privacy. It's made the internet worse, and is being used to train people into consenting to giving away their privacy without thinking... because: "clicking accept is what you have to do to use the page" -- every normal person casually browsing any site. No implementation for cookie based consent can be done correctly. Personally, I'd love to see a law that makes any/all dark patterns a crime, and empowers state prosecutors via grand jury to bring charges for them against both the company, and individual authors of the specific commits as jointly responsible. I don't want statutory laws, I want a trial jury to look at it, and decide if any technological measure, pattern, tactic, procedure, design, or measurement was used to encourage one decision over the other instead of a fair choice. I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.
- vouwfietsman 3mo ago
  > So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve? (Not the person you replied to) I'm not sure where all of this is coming from, the law is actually extremely obvious and useful: you want to track people, they have to be informed, and have to consent. The law says nothing about how, and the way it was implemented was entirely up to the corporations discretion, which of course opted for the most malicious terrible way to do it, but they did it. The purpose of the law was that people should be informed about cookies being installed and consent to that happening. Do you feel like people are now aware that cookies are being installed, more so than before the banner? Do people understand that they are consenting to this? That is the law at work. Everything above and beyond that is nice to have, and I'm sure the world would be better for it, but without the EU, people probably wouldn't even know what cookies were, let alone understand (or have control over) how they are being tracked. If that's not a net positive in a world where net-negatives happen every week, I don't know.
drnick1 3mo ago
> European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. Opting out of cookies does not mean no tracking. Tracking companies moved away from cookies a decade ago and now fingerprint the browser through JS in very subtle ways.
- msm_ 3mo ago
  And the banners are not about cookies specifically, they are about tracking. It's illegal to track people without consent.
- msm_ 3mo ago
  And the banners are not about cookies specifically, they are about tracking. It's illegal to track people without a lawful reason (and one of the valid reasons is user consent).
  - drnick1 3mo ago
    What are you supposed to learn from the banner anyway? It's just an additional annoyance. You should just assume that anything that your browser exposed may be used to track you. The real problem is that most browsers and browser configurations are far too permissive for the sake of avoiding breakage. The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical, and only allowing for very limited and coarse measurement of client-side user interaction.
    - kalleboo 3mo ago
      > The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical As long as the web is an applications platform rather a hypertext document platform there will always be enough small differences to fingerprint. There is never going to be a technical solution, the solution is going to have to be social (legal, e.g. the GDPR).
      - 3mo ago

microgpt 4mo ago

Website operators hate these cookies popups because they make their website more annoying and make me more likely to press the back button and click on a different website. As it should be. This incentivizes them to stop tracking me.

dminik 4mo ago
Why then do they make the most annoying, user-hostile dark pattern cookie banners they can come up with? No, website operators hate that they have to either stop spamming thousands of tracker scripts or put up a banner. They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
- dgellow 4mo ago
  Most of them don’t care and just integrate whatever is the most common cookie banner widget because their legal team asked them to
- anonzzzies 4mo ago
  Yeah, that's more the point; in discussions with clients I very often get asked how far we can go without any consent. Most companies want all the privacy ignoring stuff and they don't want to tell their users about it.
  - microgpt 4mo ago
    Realistically you won't be caught analyzing server-side logs of things the client is doing anyway, even if you don't follow GDPR rules with those logs. But they want Google Analytics, right?
sensanaty 4mo ago
The solution to that one is pretty simple, simply don't collect information you don't need, and you can avoid the banner altogether! Github manages to not have banners, it's not because of magic.
goobatrooba 4mo ago
There is no obligation to put a banner of you don't sell your users' data to third parties. The law is very clear that your don't need it for period technical cookies, so it's really always and every time solely about tracking and advertisement money.
- microgpt 4mo ago
  You do need it for analytics though, or any other non-essential purpose. You could probably argue self-hosted, privacy-preserving analytics is a "legitimate business purpose" so doesn't need consent. AFAIK it's because you're sending user data to Google that you normally need consent for GA.
  - sensanaty 3mo ago
    [dead]

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

ajsnigrutin 4mo ago

99% of the people just click accept and go through. This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.

sensanaty 4mo ago
Cookies have literally nothing to do with GDPR or the ePrivacy directive. It is mentioned I think twice total in both documents as an example of how user data is persisted and tracked across domains, but ultimately the mechanism is irrelevant.
kalleboo 3mo ago
You mean 96% click do not allow and go through https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o... > This could be solved on the client side GDPR legally prohibits tracking in general, not cookies specifically. Advertisers use fingerprinting more than cookies these days already, even if browsers removed cookie support altogether it wouldn't change anything.

grayhatter 4mo ago

So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve? I assume you're pretty well read up on matters of privacy, right? So you have a better awareness and understanding. But do you believe the average person does? Or would you assume that the average person has either been trained to ignore the banner, automatically consent to more invasive tracking, or is generally more confused about why the banner exists, or what it does? The cookie consent law is the dumbest application of an attempt to improve privacy. It's made the internet worse, and is being used to train people into consenting to giving away their privacy without thinking... because: "clicking accept is what you have to do to use the page" -- every normal person casually browsing any site. No implementation for cookie based consent can be done correctly. Personally, I'd love to see a law that makes any/all dark patterns a crime, and empowers state prosecutors via grand jury to bring charges for them against both the company, and individual authors of the specific commits as jointly responsible. I don't want statutory laws, I want a trial jury to look at it, and decide if any technological measure, pattern, tactic, procedure, design, or measurement was used to encourage one decision over the other instead of a fair choice. I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.

vouwfietsman 3mo ago
> So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve? (Not the person you replied to) I'm not sure where all of this is coming from, the law is actually extremely obvious and useful: you want to track people, they have to be informed, and have to consent. The law says nothing about how, and the way it was implemented was entirely up to the corporations discretion, which of course opted for the most malicious terrible way to do it, but they did it. The purpose of the law was that people should be informed about cookies being installed and consent to that happening. Do you feel like people are now aware that cookies are being installed, more so than before the banner? Do people understand that they are consenting to this? That is the law at work. Everything above and beyond that is nice to have, and I'm sure the world would be better for it, but without the EU, people probably wouldn't even know what cookies were, let alone understand (or have control over) how they are being tracked. If that's not a net positive in a world where net-negatives happen every week, I don't know.

drnick1 3mo ago

> European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. Opting out of cookies does not mean no tracking. Tracking companies moved away from cookies a decade ago and now fingerprint the browser through JS in very subtle ways.

msm_ 3mo ago
And the banners are not about cookies specifically, they are about tracking. It's illegal to track people without consent.
msm_ 3mo ago
And the banners are not about cookies specifically, they are about tracking. It's illegal to track people without a lawful reason (and one of the valid reasons is user consent).
- drnick1 3mo ago
  What are you supposed to learn from the banner anyway? It's just an additional annoyance. You should just assume that anything that your browser exposed may be used to track you. The real problem is that most browsers and browser configurations are far too permissive for the sake of avoiding breakage. The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical, and only allowing for very limited and coarse measurement of client-side user interaction.
  - kalleboo 3mo ago
    > The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical As long as the web is an applications platform rather a hypertext document platform there will always be enough small differences to fingerprint. There is never going to be a technical solution, the solution is going to have to be social (legal, e.g. the GDPR).
    - 3mo ago