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Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock

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Re: Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock

#51

Post by ino »

vruiz wrote: post #44
blub wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am basing my statements on http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm (the chapter EU legislation on cookies). According to this guide, the following cokies are exempt from consent: user-input (forms, shopping carts), authentication (for the session), user-centric security, multimedia player, ui customization, social network for logged in members. Seems quite straightforward and fair.

No it's neither straightforward nor fair. Because it's a whitelist (and a short one), not a blacklist. You can not legislate like that, making potentially illegal any use case that you could have missed or any future use case. And there is plenty of legitimate usages that are not whitelisted. The most notorious is non-shared traffic analysis. Meaning what basic google-analytics offers and half of the internet uses. T…

What are the best server side only alternatives to google analytics?

Re: Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock

#52

Post by [deleted] »

liam_ja wrote: post #15

Hi HN, I'm the creator of this filter list. If anyone can spare 5-10 minutes a week to help me and a couple of others maintain this list (testing and merging pull requests, closing issues, etc.), I'd be very appreciative! You can contact me here or send an email to cookies[at]prebake[dot]eu

[deleted]

Re: Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock

#53

Post by belorn »

facepalm wrote: post #31
belorn wrote: post #25

The reason that the EU cookie law broke down is that directly after the EU directive was issued, several lawyers from large companies changed their interpretation of an older 1995 directive that dictate how consent is given. The directive says that consent require " specific and informed indication ", but lawyers from very large companies decided that the act of continuing using a website was the same thing as giving…

Thank god, ehm, the lawyers: otherwise we would not just have annoying banners, every page would start with an blocking dialog. No thanks.

You assume that every page need to have tracking cookies or that a websites would choose to have a blocking dialog if that was required in order to store and accessing information on users’ equipment. Even if we do those assumptions, its not a good result for anyone and there need to be some peace rather than war between the industry and politics, and making the concept of consent meaningless is a very risky move going forward.

Re: Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock

#54

Post by kawsper »

mstade wrote: post #20
Kequc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These laws are still evolving and changing. Different for every country. We don't have something international we can build standards upon at this point in time. It seems to me there would also be an active push against any such implementation because it would make current solutions for getting around this type of cruft more effective than it already is. Although if we were going to go this route I'd like to see it b…

> These laws are still evolving and changing. Different for every country. We don't have something international we can build standards upon at this point in time. Not every country. This is EU legislation after all; any website hosted in one of the 28 member countries has to abide.

The cookie directive is implemented differently in each country, so if you are doing business in multiple countries[0], you are in for a bloody mess.

[0] http://cookiepedia.co.uk/cookie-laws-across-europe

Re: Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock

#55

Post by TeMPOraL »

vruiz wrote: post #44
blub wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am basing my statements on http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm (the chapter EU legislation on cookies). According to this guide, the following cokies are exempt from consent: user-input (forms, shopping carts), authentication (for the session), user-centric security, multimedia player, ui customization, social network for logged in members. Seems quite straightforward and fair.

No it's neither straightforward nor fair. Because it's a whitelist (and a short one), not a blacklist. You can not legislate like that, making potentially illegal any use case that you could have missed or any future use case. And there is plenty of legitimate usages that are not whitelisted. The most notorious is non-shared traffic analysis. Meaning what basic google-analytics offers and half of the internet uses. T…

> There is absolutely nothing wrong with knowing how many unique visitors you got today, and everyone with a website wants to know that.

Maybe people running those websites want to know that, but as a visitor, I might not want that. Being ablet o tell "how many unique visitors you got today" implies that you can group actions by unique visitors, and thus tell e.g. exactly what I was doing on your website over the course of days. If I'm not logged in, I might not want that.

And don't get me wrong - I'm not really a strong privacy advocate or something. Most of the time I don't care much about tracking. But while in theory there's nothing wrong in tracking unique visits, we all know that the primary use of this is to manipulate users and shit ads on them, nowadays mostly cross-site. It's entirely reasonable people get fed up of being on the receiving end of someone else's malice.

Re: Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock

#56

Post by vruiz »

ino wrote: post #51
vruiz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's neither straightforward nor fair. Because it's a whitelist (and a short one), not a blacklist. You can not legislate like that, making potentially illegal any use case that you could have missed or any future use case. And there is plenty of legitimate usages that are not whitelisted. The most notorious is non-shared traffic analysis. Meaning what basic google-analytics offers and half of the internet uses. T…

What are the best server side only alternatives to google analytics?

Without cookies you can not measure anything but IPs, and IPs are meaningless. You can not count unique users because in a given office you get 50 people/IP. You can not count new/recurrent users because most ISPs don't offer fixed IPs.

Re: Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock

#57

Post by vruiz »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #55
vruiz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's neither straightforward nor fair. Because it's a whitelist (and a short one), not a blacklist. You can not legislate like that, making potentially illegal any use case that you could have missed or any future use case. And there is plenty of legitimate usages that are not whitelisted. The most notorious is non-shared traffic analysis. Meaning what basic google-analytics offers and half of the internet uses. T…

> There is absolutely nothing wrong with knowing how many unique visitors you got today, and everyone with a website wants to know that. Maybe people running those websites want to know that, but as a visitor, I might not want that. Being ablet o tell "how many unique visitors you got today" implies that you can group actions by unique visitors, and thus tell e.g. exactly what I was doing on your website over the cou…

> Maybe people running those websites want to know that, but as a visitor, I might not want that. Being ablet o tell "how many unique visitors you got today" implies that you can group actions by unique visitors, and thus tell e.g. exactly what I was doing on your website over the course of days. If I'm not logged in, I might not want that.

That's like asking the guy behind the counter in a shop to not look at you because as long as you are not buying anything you don't want him to know you are there. You are entitled to your feelings but if you don't want to be seen don't go there, or care enough to open an incognito window.

> But while in theory there's nothing wrong in tracking unique visits, we all know that the primary use of this is to manipulate users and shit ads on them, nowadays mostly cross-site.

No, primary use is regular analytics. 99.9% of websites on the internet are not amazon. And if the law was for cross-site information sharing cookies then this would be a totally different debate, but it is not.

Re: Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock

#58

Post by andybak »

blub wrote: post #22
Udo wrote: post #7

This whole thing is ridiculous. While adding these widgets to blocking filters seems like a workable short-term solution, the entire cookie notice scheme is unworkable in the long run. The problem is, this crap will stack up in the future, and none of it will ever get abolished. On some sites, I get a triple-stacked legalese warning banner, and I have to manually close all three of them. Since internet law will only…

Why block them? It's good that websites have to be more transparent with how they are tracking users. It is however inconvenient for the websites. They could always stop using privacy-invading ad networks and external services which track users and then they wouldn't have to show any message.

> Why block them?

Because I have better things to do with my time than click to close the message on every single website I visit.

If you actually read them then good luck to you. I think most people either a) don't care or b) install a global blocker to suit their particular privacy requirements.

Re: Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock

#59

Post by gozo »

mstade wrote: post #24
Udo wrote: post #7

This whole thing is ridiculous. While adding these widgets to blocking filters seems like a workable short-term solution, the entire cookie notice scheme is unworkable in the long run. The problem is, this crap will stack up in the future, and none of it will ever get abolished. On some sites, I get a triple-stacked legalese warning banner, and I have to manually close all three of them. Since internet law will only…

Frankly, the requirement of notice could (and should) be pushed on to user agents – not sites. For one, it would help standardize both the user experience of notices – and leave the UX of website specific notices alone – but also it would improve the current state of things where many (most?) sites in the EU simply don't care or know about the legislation. The last thing we need is more cruft sent across the wire.

That only works if cookies are infrequent enough, like location data, which they aren't. Also there's no way for the browser to know how the cookie is used. I'm all for a technical solution, but I'm not sure it's possible to do "cruft free" without rethinking some things.

And as far as there isn't any "cookie law" on the books, it's about compliance with data protection and privacy regulation. So the EU isn't standing in the way of the industry to do that in another way.

Re: Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock

#60

Post by [deleted] »

gozo wrote: post #40
baby wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to standardize a modern authentication system separate from cookies why? Then ads will use that "new" thing as well. Cookies are enough for authentication.

The point would be that you would have to authenticate before being tracked. Today disabling cookies will break login function of a lot of sites. I'm unfortunately short on time, but you should be able to find a discussion about this around HTTP/2.

[deleted]
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