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Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked

markosaric.com

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Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked

#131

Post by jnxx »

oblio wrote: post #45
beshrkayali wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't trust governments/bureaucrats to be able to come up with a solution for this issue. This is one of those problems that evolves very quickly, and the solution probably needs to be done by a private company or by each person individually.

In 2016, I think, there were 0 airplane crashes and 0 air travel fatalities. Across 200 countries, hundreds of airlines and several airplane manufacturers, probably thousands of airports, millions of flights. If you think that was an easy feat, then I don't know what to tell you. Do you know how it was achieved? With finely tuned and ruthlessly efficient bureaucracy. When people really care, bureaucracy works wonders…

I can't find it now, but I once read a fascinating history of train braking in the US. Before modern air brakes became mandatory, trains had brake men who had to jump from on car to the other in order to fasten brakes. That had a high risk of the brake operator fallng off the moving train - and the whole train becoming uncontrollable. It was an extremely dangerous job and at the time train companies thought it would be too costly to change the system, so they resisted change.

> Bureaucracy is basically formalizing social interactions for a specific topic.

One could even say that bureaucracy is one form of organized collective action. Which in general is quite necessary for humans as a social species.

Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked

#132

Post by jgtrosh »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #120
bambax wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone consent to be tracked if given a real choice? What are the benefits? The 9% look like an error.

The 9% is probably people trying to opt out by selecting the minimum amount of cookies and hitting the big green "Accept all cookies" button instead of the small gray "save changes" button.

On this case, the form is very simple and clear. So I don't think you can easily brush them off. It could be affected by some people really not caring/understanding. It could also be affected by some people wanting to support the website.

Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked

#133

Post by fmajid »

black_puppydog wrote: post #21
beshrkayali wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why GDPR, although theoretically a good idea, is pretty much useless in practice. I'd like to see how many websites offer a reasonable consent widget that doesn't opt you in by default, keep nothing checking but a huge button to tick and accept, or the usual million-and-one checkboxes to untick, and many other cheap tricks that even the most vigilant of consumers will fall to at some point. I use everything…

More a problem of enforcement than the legislation IMO. It wouldn't take many cases to be properly litigated before publishers would understand this is a law that is to be obeyed like any other.

The Irish DPC is deliberately dragging its feet on GDPR enforcement, which is a huge problem because the majors like Facebook or Google have their European headquarters there, not so coincidentally.

Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked

#134

Post by smilespray »

amelius wrote: post #37

The real question is: is the other 91% not being tracked?

Of course they're being tracked through any and all means. The whole adtech biz is one big shady shitshow.

You can probably count the ethical, law-abiding adtech firms on one hand.

Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked

#135

Post by dageshi »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97
Mirioron wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For many services there is simply no (online, i.e. practically relevant) alternative, because none of the market players have an incentive to be privacy preserving (think major news outlets) or because the service is not interchangable due to network effects (facebook, twitter etc). But here's the big question: would these services have even existed in the first place if these laws had been in place? The internet h…

I would go the other way with it -- the problem is we don't have a low overhead system for anonymous micropayments, so ads are the only competitive way to offer a service with a very low cost (and thus price) per use. If there was an easy way to anonymously pay the site the five cents they get from the advertiser without incurring 500% payment processing overhead then would sites even be using advertising? But then w…

It's too late. You can't start to charge for things you used to give away for free. Plus with the internet, there's always an alternative, you just haven't found it yet. So the moment you run into a paywall you will turn around and start searching for the same thing you were just looking for but for free.

Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked

#136

Post by AnthonyMouse »

gear54rus wrote: post #115
shmageggy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verizon/Yahoo/Techcrunch is such a blatant offender, and especially noticable because they get posted here often. Their modal is a giant obfuscation dark-pattern, and far as I can tell, there is no way to opt out.

I'd like to remind you and everyone else about Firefox reader mode. Solves like 99% of this user-enslaving shit.

And this is really the solution to all of it in the end. A user agent which is actually an agent of the user.

Can't wait until first party isolation is the default in browsers.

Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked

#137

Post by smilespray »

lysium wrote: post #90
innocenat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine the people who do that to be a very small percentage.

I know many people who only browse in incognito mode.

I do, too, but fingerprinting still works for these people. In fact, using Incognito Mode is part of the fingerprint.

Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked

#138

Post by Fradow »

Paianni wrote: post #81

Surprised no one has mentioned the systems that, if opted out of, redirect users to a 'privacy policy' page and won't allow access to content without opting in. Or the sites that don't bother with compliance and just show a message to the effect of 'this site operates under a jurisdiction that may have different privacy laws to your country' and leaves it at that.

Those very much falls in the shady part.

The first option, redirect, is not GDPR-compliant, because then the "consent" cannot be considered freely given, and thus is not valid

The second option is really borderline, and could work out for a US-only news website, for example (arguing it doesn't cater to European residents), but would be non-compliant for a business which knowingly serve European residents.

Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked

#139

Post by jariel »

bambax wrote: post #93
davidweatherall wrote: post #2

The author's consent form is very simple and isn't using any shady UX tricks to get the user to consent. One action will opt you in, one action will opt you out. I wonder what results you would see for something like yahoo, the daily mail, reddit, or other sites that heavily rely on ad revenue, which attempt to force the user to accept the cookies through non-obvious no buttons, or long processes to opt out of cookie…

Why would anyone consent to be tracked if given a real choice? What are the benefits? The 9% look like an error.

"What are the benefits? "

? That the site exists in the first place ?

Why is it so hard for people to do business math and these conversations on HN never have anything to do with material reality of the parties involved?

It's understandable that we all want something for free - that's easy - but it's not understandable that we can't grasp how revenue is used to pay journalists etc.. We know they're all on the edge of going out of business and that thousands of news organisations are gone.

Whatever our 'personal cost' is, targeting ads definitely works, it makes money.

So that's the 'benefit' - you get people doing labour for you which otherwise, you'd have to pay for.

Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked

#140

Post by lrem »

bambax wrote: post #93
davidweatherall wrote: post #2

The author's consent form is very simple and isn't using any shady UX tricks to get the user to consent. One action will opt you in, one action will opt you out. I wonder what results you would see for something like yahoo, the daily mail, reddit, or other sites that heavily rely on ad revenue, which attempt to force the user to accept the cookies through non-obvious no buttons, or long processes to opt out of cookie…

Why would anyone consent to be tracked if given a real choice? What are the benefits? The 9% look like an error.

The same reason I enable telemetry in software I use - I want the system to be optimized for my usage pattern.
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