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Europe’s cookie consent reckoning is coming

techcrunch.com

11–20 of 73 posts

Re: Europe’s cookie consent reckoning is coming

#14
post #6

An article dissing cookie popups has a cookie popup with no easy opt out. Amazing.

It's easy to make that take. But try to see the story from the other side.

The person writing that article is a journalist who almost certainly has no direct connection to the ad department of his site and the people who are responsible for the cookie banner. (I sympathize, because I'm a journalist with no direct connection to any of those things.)

It's an unfortunate reality that most media orgs use shitty ad tech. There's also an alignment of incentives that makes it hard for media orgs to do anything else.

For a journalist there's few options how to handle this:

1. Still write about these things and be called hypocritical.

2. Don't write about these things and avoid being called hypocritical.

3. Write about these things on sites without cookies and shitty ads (e.g. a private, simple blog) and don't get payed.

I don't think 2 is particularly preferrable and it should be understandable that 3 is not particularly attractive.

Re: Europe’s cookie consent reckoning is coming

#15
I was and still am totally amazed that people still think it's a good idea to require each individual site owner to comply with that kind of policy instead of letting the browser vendors do the hard work.

Which is easier - to modify and monitor billions of different sites, or to create a framework and obligations on the side of browsers to handle it?

Something like requiring all browsers to start with cookies disabled, and mandating exactly how those users who do consent to tracking can be tracked (up to minute technical details), would do wonders if the goal is to actually improve privacy instead of just making it easy for Google and Facebook to continue doing what they do, while making life harder for millions of small companies and increasing bureucratic load while doing it.

Re: Europe’s cookie consent reckoning is coming

#16
post #5

And they employ exactly the same tactics they describe. TC is such a pile of gunk.

Eh, they used to be a lot worse. Nowadays it's just 2-3 clicks to reject all tracking on TC. Could be better but I'll take it.

Same with Google and Facebook. It looks like they're starting to get in line.

Re: Europe’s cookie consent reckoning is coming

#17
> The problem is that most websites simply aren’t compliant. They choose to make a mockery of the law by offering a skewed choice: Typically a super simple opt-in (to hand them all your data) vs a highly confusing, frustrating, tedious opt-out (and sometimes even no reject option at all).

Like the Techcrunch site where this was published.

Re: Europe’s cookie consent reckoning is coming

#18
The Gist: A non-profit developed a cralwer which can pick up misleading (or non-working) cookie-consent banners.

> with a plan to file up to 10,000 complaints against offenders over the course of this year

> Today it’s announcing the first batch of 560 complaints, large and small

> noyb is even giving offenders a warning first — and a full month to clean up their ways

In general I'm not a fan of vigilante law enforcers, specifically if they attach an invoice to their warnings.

I hope noyb won't and that the small in large and small doesn't mean people will loose their jobs. If that's the case then god-speed.

If not I fear a lot of warned sites are going to be run by barely profitable family-run businesses, who barely managed to have a consent-banner at all and whose sites are barely visted anyways (thus causing next to little harm).

Re: Europe’s cookie consent reckoning is coming

#19
You can't even click on the techcrunch link if you have uMatrix, it's blocked due to their redirect tracking. TC (and some other notable sites, I think engadget and others) employs a tracking-by-redirect scheme through https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers which is a well-known tracker that has been discussed here and on many reddit threads it seems...

Re: Europe’s cookie consent reckoning is coming

#20
post #15

I was and still am totally amazed that people still think it's a good idea to require each individual site owner to comply with that kind of policy instead of letting the browser vendors do the hard work. Which is easier - to modify and monitor billions of different sites, or to create a framework and obligations on the side of browsers to handle it? Something like requiring all browsers to start with cookies disable…

I still haven't figured out how to opt out after initially opting in. Having a standard place in the browser would make this simple.
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