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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

#171

Post by distances »

smilespray wrote: post #134
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.

I work on mobile apps, and I can promise there's no tracking on the apps I've been building if you opt out. The SDKs I've seen seem to do what they promise: no communication to backend when tracking is disabled.

Of course, I can only speak for the apps I've been building and SDKs I've used.

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

#173

Post by literallycancer »

iso1631 wrote: post #162
elcomet wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that tracking here is used for advertisment and not to give you a better service. Would you still accept it ?

Some people would rather have products they are interested in rather than products they aren't interested in

Products that you didn't find yourself by deliberately searching for them are never the products you want.

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

#174

Post by literallycancer »

jariel wrote: post #155
alkonaut wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needing ad revenue and needing to track visitors are different things. Structurally obviously we are now in a situation where “well targeted ads” can generate some revenue, and “well behaved ads” barely can. The future has to be one where dumber ads pay more because tracking isn’t technically possible and/or illegal.

"The future has to be one where dumber ads pay more because tracking isn’t technically possible and/or illegal." So you're inching closer to the reality. Read your statement again though: where is this 'magical ad tech' that enables newsies to make a decent dolllar? It's non existent. Ergo, they are out of business and you get severely limited content. So, either people can chose to share some basic information, pay,…

You mean we are going to see proportionally more content from people who actually know what they are writing about rather than professional clickbait writers? Doesn't seem so bleak to me.

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

#175

Post by pyepye »

Before I found out about ublock origins filter lists I always wanted to opt-out of these GDPR cookie banners, modals etc but I got a lot of fatigue having to follow all the steps for each website.

I tried to make an open source extension to try and do it for me: https://github.com/pyepye/GDPR-opt-out

Although I hit a snag where some GDPR banners / buttons didn't return when using `querySelector` in the extension but do when you use the inspector / console and do it manually.

Does anyone know why and how to work around it? It was always something I wanted to know why but didn't find the time to dig into (and wasn't important while using ublock origin)

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

#176

Post by dageshi »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #148
dageshi wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's too late. What do you say we try it and find out? > 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. Because the existing paywalls are some nonsense where you have to give them your home address and sign up to pay a recurring monthly fee which you know is going to be a bear to cancel and costs dollars rather than cents, whe…

People have been talking about this idea for maybe 20 years (that I can recall). I'm also pretty sure there've been numerous attempts at implementations because really it's not that complicated a thing to make.

None of them caught on though because when it comes down to it, most sites that successfully make money can probably make more money from advertising than they can from this microtransaction system so there's no incentive for them to adopt it.

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

#177

Post by osullip »

shmageggy wrote: post #5
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…

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.

This is what yahoo were doing in 2018 (it's my twitter) https://twitter.com/pos43/status/999606375217967104

I found a very convoluted way of opting out: https://twitter.com/pos43/status/1001331147110957056

It is now 2020 and I would be interested to see if these methods have been changed to make them easier or harder.

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

#178

Post by sukilot »

fmajid wrote: post #133
black_puppydog wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How can a company that violates law in 13 countries just choose which country gets to enforce?

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

#179

Post by alkonaut »

jariel wrote: post #155
alkonaut wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needing ad revenue and needing to track visitors are different things. Structurally obviously we are now in a situation where “well targeted ads” can generate some revenue, and “well behaved ads” barely can. The future has to be one where dumber ads pay more because tracking isn’t technically possible and/or illegal.

"The future has to be one where dumber ads pay more because tracking isn’t technically possible and/or illegal." So you're inching closer to the reality. Read your statement again though: where is this 'magical ad tech' that enables newsies to make a decent dolllar? It's non existent. Ergo, they are out of business and you get severely limited content. So, either people can chose to share some basic information, pay,…

> Ergo they are out of business and you get severely limited content

Yes. That’s a side effect I think needs to be taken into account. I see ad blocking and the GDPR as a way of cleaning out bad actors (and their content), but hopefully also a way to give an advantage to good actors. Like authorities shutting down restaurants that don’t pay their taxes. The selection short term goes down, jobs are affected etc., but it’s unfair competition if they aren’t playing fair.

> where is this 'magical ad tech' that enables newsies to make a decent dolllar? It's non existent.

To be clear I don’t mind if ad blocking and the GDPR in concert work to kill 90% of the 2000-2020 era web in terms of “free content”. Should the survival of online firms, content producers, the adtech industry etc even be a consideration here?

> people can chose to share some basic information

I’m all for that. But without transparency like what the GDPR tries to enforce, people aren’t making an informed decision.

I never consent to anything even on sites I really enjoy and wish would survive, because I don’t trust the chain of actors involved, nor do I understand exactly what I consent to.

But I’d be happy to fill in an extremely detailed survey about everything I’m interested in down to my shoe size, and have that data accessible by any site without even asking me. That together with the browsing context should be more than enough to show targeted ads.

In the end this discussion usually comes down to the question “yes you think subscriptions etc is better but don’t you think others should be free to pay with PII if both sides of the transaction agree? They are adults after all” to which my answer is basically “no”.

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

#180

Post by ThePhysicist »

Small changes in UI can have a significant effect on acceptance rate. I'm developing an open-source consent tool (Klaro - https://klaro.kiprotect.com, Github: https://github.com/kiprotect/klaro) and where to put the different buttons, which colors to give to them and how easy to make opt-out is a large debate in our community. By default we favor a very user-friendly approach but we give our users (i.e. the website owners) different ways to ask for consent: A mandatory modal, a consent flow that accepts all cookies/apps (or customize) and a consent flow that accepts only a pre-selection of cookies/apps by default. In every flow there's a "Decline" button that visitors can use, so declining consent is just as easy as giving it. Most website publishers prefer the "Accept all" flow as they usually have a good reason for including a given app/tracker on their website, so only choosing a subset doesn't make much sense. A few sites also implement the mandatory flow, where the visitor won't be able to see the website content until he/she has chosen to either give or decline consent (and again, both options are equally simple to reach).

From a GDPR and ePrivacy perspective it's clear that opting out needs to be just as easy as opting in. Most websites violate this principle as opting in is in fact way easier, and often the UI is designed to be deliberately confusing to the user.

IMHO the consent problem one of the central unsolved issues in privacy though, as most people would not opt-in to tracking if they were given a real choice.

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