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French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

fr.reuters.com

51–60 of 144 posts

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#51

I never understood why that EU regulation wasn't required at the browser level in the first place.

Because that EU regulation deals with people’s right to privacy, and control over their data in the abstract. It not limited to just websites and the internet, browsers and cookies are just one of many places where compliance should be achieved.

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#52
post #33

OT, but I feel people who care about this perhaps knows the answer. Is there a browser that pretends to accepts all cookies but never saves them?

It's more complicated than just that: the sites are designed that they just don't work if the browsers don't show them the cookies they saved before. And there's the whole story about the "third party cookies" and on today's pages there is often much more "third party" content than anything else and there are often dependencies on third parties to even see the content.

So to be able to somehow reduce the exposure, while avoiding every time clicking for a long time to accept and reject all the conditions from some big sources like Google (where in Google case is anyway not possible to affect much in spite of what one clicks, as the EU sees), one way would be to construct the compartments, i.e. keep a few "related" sites inside of something that the sites see as a unique browser. Then one has to maintain as easy as possible all that, to appear to the sites as "unique browsers", while using one.

Firefox has the "containers" for that but the use of them is, as far as I've tried, a bit clumsy -- it's still quite hard to manage what happens in which container -- there's too much manual work to do and it's easy to make errors, even if the user has the general idea of how he'd like to compartmentalize his surfing.

Chrome, of course, is less interested to enable their users to hide something from Google.

And Firefox is also not guaranteed to ultimately do exactly what the user would like the most, especially as the users for years flocked to Chrome, directly showing that they "don't care" giving Google what Google wants, as long as it's more "convenient." The structure of Mozilla entities is also somehow made to induce some decision problems which became more prominent with the time.

It doesn't seem that the "free market" can solve this, and EU intervening long-term could work, if they manage to be consistent enough and manage to enforce that. But it takes a lot of time.

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#53
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If any browser vendor just pushed a trivial standard like X-Consent: no-cookies X-Consent: cookies-ok Sites would have gobbled that header up overnight, and the other browsers would have received substantial pressure to follow. But it's a missed beat by now, nobody is paying to have hundreds of thousands of web sites updated for such a thing even if it did exist. Sucks none of the major browser vendors are based in E…

Not quite sure if this is sarcasm ? The do not track header is about 10 years old, ans was promptly ignored by all websites DNT: 1 DNT: 0

DNT is too simple, there should be new better standard integrated in web browsers. The never ending popups with absolutely 0 constancy across sites is atrocious, moreover if I rejected a cookie for a domain on site A I will be prompted on site B if I want to reject it again.

For every domain that wants to create cookies, I should be prompted by the browser (like I allow camera access) if I authorize it to do so, we can even imagine that each domain would have cookies purpose information ('mydomain.com/cookies_policy') in JSON that the browser is able to present to the user (describing each cookie of the domain). Then the browser would be responsible to never create cookies that I rejected.

The main advantage would be that in incognito mode I would not have to repeat myself 10 times a day.

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did set DNT but I'm still getting tracked. I do not want to disable all cookies, I'm perfectly happy to use credential cookies or a shopping cart, I do not want to disable everything indiscriminately. Also I shouldn't have to out out.

> I do not want to disable all cookies, I'm perfectly happy to use credential cookies or a shopping cart The cookie banner that you have to refuse/accept only concerns cookies that are not necessary for the proper functioning of the site. So login cookies or shopping cart are unaffected by the consent, and if your site has nothing else than this, it does not need to ask for consent.

Many sites, upon clicking reject, do not actually disable anything and simply suggest you disable cookies in your browser (sometimes with instructions).

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#55
post #4
post #3

This cookie insanity has to stop. Instead of adding popups everywhere, users should’ve been trained to use the options of their browsers, which have existed for decades.

Companies would still have to be mandated to respect said options, as when the voluntary DNT was added, companies went "lalala can't hear you"

Then what is the reason that `robots.txt` is so widely followed even without a legal requirement to do so?

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#56

> The CNIL rejected the companies’ arguments that it had no right to impose the sanctions because their respective European headquarters are in Ireland and Luxembourg So they are fine with taking French money, but want to be above their laws?

This is the whole point of having your headquarters in those countries: make money in country X but be taxed according to country Y laws. Why would they not want to be under country Y laws for things other than taxes?

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#57
post #24

Honestly who care about cookies. All those popup are just anoying.

The legislation was to discourage tracking. Unfortunately it backfired and now the web is even more shit. Easy tracking, particularly via Google and ad networks, is considered so important to basically everyone that deploys it (metrics, revenue), that they feel it's acceptable to put the banners up, rather than develop a different way of gathering and managing the data they want. The fines aren't large enough. Google…

> rather than develop a different way of gathering and managing the data they want.

European laws doesn't care what way it is done.

It doesn't need to be cookies, it could be actual magic for that matter and EU would still fine them if they use it to collect user data without consent.

And, as others have pointed out: login cookies seems to be fine (as long as one doesn't use them to collect data.)

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#58
post #18

Folks - you control your browser / if cookies accepted / how long to keep them. While scammers rip folks off for huge amounts each year (Microsoft technical support scams etc) regulators are busy with this. I just wish there was a button that said I accept all cookies and I’d never see these damn pop ups again.

Wouldn't websites fail in obscure ways if you disabled cookies? That would mean few people would disable them, so in turn web developers wouldn't care about making the errors less obscure, etc.

> Wouldn't websites fail in obscure ways if you disabled cookies?

I believe that the way most people who care about this issue have them enabled, but deleted when the browser is closed. Therefore nothing breaks while your browser is opened, and if you restart it, you basically get a fresh start (signed off everywhere).

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#59
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies would still have to be mandated to respect said options, as when the voluntary DNT was added, companies went "lalala can't hear you"

Then what is the reason that `robots.txt` is so widely followed even without a legal requirement to do so?

There is an incentive to not abuse their own server time serving robots, essentially creating the status quo.

Meanwhile, advertisers value users' data like gold. Unlike server time, most advertisers are okay to collect their own data for advertising purposes, and this causes them to have an unwritten agreement to collect data. Unless there is a stronger stick to force them otherwise, it is in their best interests to collect data and you need to have active intervention to prevent it.

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