Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis

0: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

How does my browser know that one PHPSESSID is used for tracking, and another is a session? You probably mean until I close the browser, which would be never -- at least, I would never want to, but I do every few months for browser updates. (My laptop always goes in suspend/sleep mode.)

> Ditto for third-party cookies

I don't know what third-party cookies are anyway, and I bet my peers could not give me an accurate description either. We're all in the software business, be it game development or general software development or something.

Two gave a rough description but couldn't answer a question about whether embedded Like buttons would work if the user is logged into Facebook. Another just said "I don't know".

I'm not sure "the public is informed about all their options by now". The ones who really care generally use uBlock, ABP, Self-Destructing Cookies, Ghostery, etc., the rest just click "ok" because the sites do not inform them about these aforementioned possibilities: that wouldn't be in their interest.

> Duplicating UI in a website is a solution looking for a problem

Oh I agree it's an issue, I hate this cookie wall as much as anyone. I would love for there to be no need to ever see this wall.

> It has never been enforced that way to my knowledge, anywhere in the EU. Which law or court decision says that it is actually illegal?

I am not sure fines have been dealt, but the Dutch ACM ("authority for consumer and markets", literally translated) did give out warnings to non-compliant sites and they subsequently places cookie walls.

The law simply says no such cookies may be placed, it doesn't say "for a few months while users are unaware, and after that, oh well, have some fun picking your own privacy laws as you wish."

And yes, I know functional cookies and simple tracking is allowed if you don't invade a person's privacy. This means practically every major website knowingly tries to invade your privacy, because they have these walls in place. What do people say? "Fucking government does not understand the internet, look at all these walls." What should we be saying? "Wait why are they trying to create detailed profiles of me in the first place?"

Not to mention I don't think it's a solution that's viable given economic principle and how much people value expression. We'd just be back to the equivalent of Flash sites again, with whatever takes over for flash (canvas?).

There's a risk / frequency trade off with all of these. Privacy can be quite possibly costly or fatal, though slightly more rare. Not so rare though that 20% of all Web users in a US Department of Commerce survey (see my recent comments history) report known credit card fraud. That's many tens of millions of affected users.

The security risks are similar but also extend to organisations which might stand to lose control over their own (validly) private information, or control over systems (see for example concerns over SCADA infrastructure, or industrial process control).

Usability and adaptability issues pose lower risks, but have a much larger affected field.

It goes well beyond the visually disabled, illiterate, and cognitively challenged. Anyone who's landed on a desktop site that's unusable on mobile has encountered a usability challenge. Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are all rapidly pushing us, some kicking and screaming (I include myself) to an audible Web -- one in which the primary control and response interfaces are spoken.

What landing on a small set of templates does is provide for clearly parseable and understandable content. In a world where the goal isn't to read a full page but to extract and convey a useful item of information from it, wading verbally through megabytes of unparsable and nonexcludable content isn't particularly useful (and yes, figuring out how much a data reference is worth to the data-rerference intermediary is another question worth considering).

More generally, in my case, with only modest perceptual impairments (reading small, low-contrast type is among the earlier signs of your impending death), I've come to conclude for some years now that Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. There are only so many ways you can present content that doesn't fuck with readability. I try, very hard, to ensure I'm not doing this on my own modest designs (look up "Edward Morbius's Motherfucking Web Page", a riff on a popular refrain, for my own principals in action).

My most common response when landing on a website is to sigh, roll my eyes, and dump it to something more readable. Firefox's Reader Mode. Pocket. Straight ASCII text. w3m.

And no, "novel graphic design" isn't conveying vast new amounts of information. I grew tired of hearing that argument 30 years ago, it's not got fresher since. Bloomberg, The New York Times, and the BBD are all experimenting with high-concept article formatting. In my experienct, without exception, it simply Gets In The Fucking Way.

My half-serious response to this is to create a new web browser embodying these and a few other principles. The working title is "the fuck your web design browser". FYWD for short.

Ninnies may opt to call it the Fine Young Western Dinosaurs browser as an alternative.