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It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

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Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#141

Post by dijit »

bradleyjg wrote: post #102
dijit wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. But the axiom is misguided. Legislation on the safety of cars for instance is not free, but necessary. You could argue that the makers of go-karts are being priced out of the market: after all, the free market should make people put a price on their own safety. But the issue is often that people don’t really have a good grasp of what it truly means and you can’t put a monetary number on things like that.

I’m not an anarchist, I just don’t think people always realize or recognize that there will be downsides as well as upsides to the latest “sounds good” piece of legislation.

Sure. But the way you framed it makes it sound as if the legislation is a net bad thing. But when I get a GDPR block warning I’m actually happy because it means that company can’t operate without mishandling or selling my data. — sure the cost for them is higher, but it’s not unreasonable. I think a lot of people unduly criticise the GDPR because there is an industry building that requires fear mongering to get its way.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#142

Post by 411111111111111 »

brador wrote: post #123
mrweasel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do companies even bother writing that? They clearly don't care, if they did that box wouldn't even be there. Sites like Imgur are the absolute worst. "We care about your privacy" and presents you with a list of 1200 companies they share information with.

Is there any way to auto opt-out of these sites? Like an adblocker, but for these privacy pops?

ublock origin has several "annoyances" filters you can enable in the settings, they w usually remove them.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#143

Post by denton-scratch »

bradleyjg wrote: post #42

Lawmakers and voters sometimes act as if regulations are free. They think “wouldn’t it be nice” and pass on the costs to businesses. They aren’t in fact free.

Of course regulations are not without cost to those being regulated.

Lawmakers and voters would prefer not to have regulations; they would prefer if businesses just did the right thing. But they don't, so they have to be regulated. And nobody wants the cost of that regulation to fall on voters; so it falls on businesses.

Hey, who makes money out of these websites? Voters? Nope. Why should anyone but businesses pay the costs of regulating businesses?

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#144

Post by denton-scratch »

zinekeller wrote: post #72
bradleyjg wrote: post #42

Lawmakers and voters sometimes act as if regulations are free. They think “wouldn’t it be nice” and pass on the costs to businesses. They aren’t in fact free.

The user here just wants honesty - a "As a local American* media, we cannot afford the additional costs of GDPR compliance. As such, this content is not available to EU/EEA." That's it. Not "We are evaluating options to deliver your favorite [sic] content to EEA." when they already decided to no longer server Europeans. * "local American media" WTF. Almost all of you are large corporates.

This is trivially easy for "local american media" to solve: if you can't manage consent, then stop depositing cookies on European computers.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#145

Post by 411111111111111 »

piva00 wrote: post #138
unishark wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to see only that, but lately I've been seeing cases where once you choose the "manage cookies" option, all the nonessential cookies are opted out by default.

I can't trust that, a lot of websites do that but also keep all of the "Legitimate Interest" boxes ticked by default, I need to check every single pop-up to see if that's the case or not. I hate these dark patterns and in spite I do lose my time to uncheck everything I can, if I can't untick everything in less than 20 seconds I simply close the website, no matter what.

You could also enable the annoyances filter lists if you're using ublock origin. They remove the prompt altogether, but you've not given permission to anything.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#146

Post by denton-scratch »

roenxi wrote: post #14
raverbashing wrote: post #5

I always read this as: "Our European visitors are important to us BUT vacuuming all your data and selling to multiple bidders is importanter " You wanna be obnoxious? Sure, go ahead, but I'll dislike your site more (and I have adblock so I have no qualms in accepting). Wanna pretend you're compliant by having an obvious non-compliant "solution" and think that will shield your responsibility? Now I'll just hate you an…

They're serving you a web-page regardless. It probably isn't the data as much as they don't want to run afoul of EU law. Breaking the law is a generally considered a big mistake and regardless of the stereotyping about businesses they can be pretty timid when dealing with governments.

But they are breaking the law.

"Accept/Ask me later" is in violation of the GDPR.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#147

Post by zinekeller »

denton-scratch wrote: post #144
zinekeller wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The user here just wants honesty - a "As a local American* media, we cannot afford the additional costs of GDPR compliance. As such, this content is not available to EU/EEA." That's it. Not "We are evaluating options to deliver your favorite [sic] content to EEA." when they already decided to no longer server Europeans. * "local American media" WTF. Almost all of you are large corporates.

This is trivially easy for "local american media" to solve: if you can't manage consent, then stop depositing cookies on European computers.

> then stop depositing cookies on European computers.

You've got GDPR super wrong. If you think GDPR was only about cookies, you've got it wrong (but that's where Google et al. focuses your attention to be honest- disinformation about GDPR and focusing on cookies even when cookies is NOT what GDPR is about).

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#148

Post by bradleyjg »

denton-scratch wrote: post #143
bradleyjg wrote: post #42

Lawmakers and voters sometimes act as if regulations are free. They think “wouldn’t it be nice” and pass on the costs to businesses. They aren’t in fact free.

Of course regulations are not without cost to those being regulated. Lawmakers and voters would prefer not to have regulations; they would prefer if businesses just did the right thing. But they don't, so they have to be regulated. And nobody wants the cost of that regulation to fall on voters; so it falls on businesses. Hey, who makes money out of these websites? Voters? Nope. Why should anyone but businesses pay th…

It is magical thinking to believe that a law can impose a cost on businesses and it will come straight out of the pockets of the owners of that business.

There’s an entire sub-field of economics devoted to studying where the incidence of taxes and regulations fall, but voters don’t care to read the literature. If it sounds like we are sticking it to the people that their oversimplified model of the world has decided are bad guys, they are all for it.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#149

Post by denton-scratch »

PennRobotics wrote: post #54
tinus_hn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a bit silly because serving the content without cookies doesn’t cost more than not serving anything. It’s not like a restaurant where serving a steak means you now have one less steak, it’s just data that you can copy as much as you want.

I mean, data transfer is not totally without costs. At a few thousand reads per day, a MB or so per read... this is costing up to FIFTY DOLLARS PER YEAR to just... give our content away for free?!

Hang on; you're still serving ads, no?

So what's this about "free"? I mean, you weren't planning to charge me in the first place.

So you want to set a cookie so that you can make your ads more "targetted", and so more valuable? There's no public evidence that ad targetting even works.

But this "free" business - I suspect that some local US paper doesn't make a lot of money from ads served to EU residents. So is it possible that the lost revenue stream is from selling PII to data brokers? Oh dear - that's pretty evil, even if the visitor isn't in the EU.

Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

#150

Post by trompetenaccoun »

mrweasel wrote: post #100
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #18

“We care about your privacy.” is also a real joker. Those boxes often provide no “opt-out all” button and force you to “object” to “legitimate interests” one-by-one even if you do “opt-out”.

Why do companies even bother writing that? They clearly don't care, if they did that box wouldn't even be there. Sites like Imgur are the absolute worst. "We care about your privacy" and presents you with a list of 1200 companies they share information with.

Because lying works, propaganda works. You won't ever be able to convince everyone but you can confuse enough people that there isn't a united front that demands change. Especially those who want to believe because they're comfortable and thus reluctant to challenge the status quo. Also people who aren't intelligent enough to understand what's going on.
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