This is why the GDPR is a bad law. Of course nobody wants to be tracked. If you believe that the harms of tracking outweigh the benefits of increased revenue, then just ban tracking altogether. Instead, the GDPR incentivizes sites to come up with these dark patterns so they can claim that users "voluntarily" "consented", when everyone knows that's not the case.
Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
401–410 of 457 posts
Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most services existed before, with a variety of models. E.g. Both subscription and ad revenue based free news papers existed long before the internet. Somehow they managed, without the need to track ones every move. Would the internet look the same, with the same players and behaviours if these laws existed? No probably not. But I also don't think the internet is in a very desirable state. Maybe, we would have had mo…
> Most services existed before, with a variety of models. E.g. Both subscription and ad revenue based free news papers existed long before the internet. Yes, but aren't most of those newspapers essentially partisan politics? Every free newspaper I've seen IRL has been backed by somebody trying to push for politics. From my experience they also tend to not be that informative. > Maybe, we would have had more invention…
I don't know in detail world wide, but Europe has or had several free daily news papers for commuters piled up in train and bus stations. the ones I know used to be fairly neutral because they just printed what came in from news agencies like Reuters, AP, etc with minor changes (license fee is much higher if you want to print 1:1).
As for informational value. They were good enough to keep up to date what is going on, and then use other sources to dig deeper.
I'm not against ads, in fact in small populations like Switzerland where I'm from, fully subscription funded news papers have never been viable to my knowledge. They were always majority advertisment funded. The subscriptions basically pays for having the news paper printed and delivered, not much more.
But the ads that used to pay the peoples bills were those full pagers, clients payed tens to hundreds of thousand of dolars for a single issue. It still worked reasonably well online on desktop with plenty of screen real estate, but with the raise of mobile prices collapsed.
I worked at one of the largest publishers in Switzerland during that time and saw first hand what got cut during re-org: Fact checkers, specialists, investigative departments, international correspondents, etc. News rooms from supposedly independent news papers in the portfolio got merged. More and more pressure to write article to perform on facebook.
All things that a normal reader will not immediately notice, but that severly affect quality and journalistic integrity long term.
While I think having all information available for everyone worldwide would be amazing, I don't see the current situation sustainable quality wise for anyone beyond the few top percent of market leaders.
I don't know how to solve it either, why I said, maybe we would have come up with different models if we didn't go down the path we did. And a lot of these old organisations have to take a lot of the blame of just not reacting to change for years.
But whoever you point fingers at, as it it stands, we are headed for a lose-lose information wise in my opinion.
Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
#403Earlier 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.
Reader mode is awesome! I'd love an option to automatically use it for any page that it supports rather than having to select it each time though.
Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
#404Fundamentally, the browser is the user's agent. Storing cookies, running tracking scripts, etc. should be controlled by the browser. Some browsers may take a strict "block everything" approach, some may be relaxed, and some may harass the user with prompts. Users are free to choose the appropriate browser. Depending on websites to limit tracking by on their own is very difficult, since it is inherently against many w…
This is nice in theory, except the amount of fragmentation in 2020 is huge. The average user simply cannot switch browsers. The likelihood of encountering a website that breaks even switching from Chrome to Firefox is too much for any normal user to want to bother for just these purposes. They'll switch back the minute they find a website that doesn't work in their new browser, if they even get that far. So unless yo…
> This is nice in theory, except the amount of fragmentation in 2020 is huge.
The GDPR popups is not nice in theory or practice.
Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
#405Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No one benefits from users clicking to No Consent. The user does. Or did you mean something else I am missing?
I meant the owners of the site and advertisers.
Sites already have plenty of information in order to run good advertising on their content.
Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jail time is probably the only suitable enough deterrent for adtech nightmares. Fines are just treated as a cost of doing business expense, and doesn't directly even hurt the terrible people making these decisions. When someone commits a wrong, the punishment is in part based on the amount of harm. You might feel that adtech causes small harms, if you look at harm against an individual, but adtech folks harm billions…
Most studies pretty clearly show that harsher punishments are not an effective deterrent.
This refers to the "normal" people not businesses or rich execs. Giving them for example 20 years instead of 5 doesn't change much, because 5 is already a lot. If someone does crime, because of poverty, being mentally ill, or because of addiction no jail time will be a strong enough deterrent.
If businesses actually would have fines that significantly hurt the business (and not being able to deduct it from taxes, if they were unable to pay, they would have to close down) would absolutely help and would change the calculation from fine being a cost of doing the business to a punishment for illegal behavior.
Having executives be personally responsible for decisions and go to a real jail would be even a stronger motivator.
The current problem is that there's no real deterrent.
Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
DockerHub uses a company/product called "TrustArc: TRUSTe" and they have _exactly_ this method. The slowdown is intentional. People who come up with sort of tactics and those who implement them should go to jail. It's beyond infuriating. I've decided to not upload my images to dockerhub because of this. Edit: jail time is not for anger obviously, but for intentionally swindling people. It'll be handled on a case by c…
Why jail? I think we should just execute them on the spot. /s
Just like we do in the USA for the crime of 'suspicion of selling loose cigarettes'!
Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
#409What really drives me crazy are prompts that start by showing two options: "Consent to all cookies", or "customize". If you click "customize", it opens a new modal window with a loading indicator that just doesn't seem to finish. I literally waited 60 seconds and then tried again by refreshing the page, ending up with another infinite loading indicator. This means that users are de-factor forced to click "consent to…
OneTrust, Evidon, and the rest of the "privacy management" services...why can't I just click once at their site that I don't want any cookies from any of the companies that use them? I just went through a thing with Evidon where each of their opt outs is a JS-required redirect, and when you get to a company like Adobe, you have to click on a million things with a million disappointments. https://imgur.com/a/d2qMJqn I…
It's clear, that the GDPR should be amended so the only way that tracking will be allowed is to have user send a notary signed letter every year saying that s/he wants to be tracked with a minimum 3 pages of attachment explanation why tracking is so great (in own words, no templates allowed). The company will be required to keep physical copies of these letters for 10 years for random checkups.
Fuck the adtech industry.
Re: Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usually the "no tracking" option requires no action. Simply don't press anything in the banner.
Then you get nowhere. The actually compliant popups (maybe about 1/3?) have a really hard to see "reject" button somewhere, while the others make it impossible or force you to click "learn more" (of course customzation options are behind that, very logical yes) and deselct everything manually. Asshole design ("dark patterns") should be illegal generally, but in this case it already clearly is. Can we have some enforc…
Yes, and a lot of dismiss buttons -- not just for this, but all kinds of ads/pop-ups -- flat out don't work on mobile landscape mode, which gives them plausible deniability.