can you build a website nowadays with analytics without using cookies? or violating GDPR?
Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
61–70 of 662 posts
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#62The entity that has legislative power takes responsibility for unintended consequences of its legislation. At least this is how Anglo/Common Wealth cultures think about it. You can see that Germans think about this differently.
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#63Yes there is. More specifically, it’s the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive 2002/58/EC, which each member state adjusts their own laws to follow. It’s published here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... The relevant part: > Article 5 > Confidentiality of the communications > 3. Member States shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information…
But that is what the title states and is explained in the article. There is no law that forces a cookie banner. There is a law that requires consent before tracking, but that is not necessarily about showing a banner - that is just one of the possible ways of complying with the law. There is an electronic privacy law, and it is quite comprehensive. There is no "cookie banner law".
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come on, this is such a ridiculous take. Adding google adsense to a website needs a cookie bar. That’t not "doing sketchy shit with people's data" I can’t believe how many people have bought into this EU regulation hook line and sinker. It’s ridiculous, imagine the man hours that have been wasted in the last 7 years just clicking cookie bars. And as OP says, it’s completely unrealistic to not have them.
Google Adsense is doing sketchy shit with peoples data.
Advertising is “ground zero” for the cookie explosion because nobody trusts anybody in the advertising biz.
For instance the website selling ads has every reason to inflate view and click count numbers, the ad buyer has reasons to diminish those numbers. In fact if you measure an honest pipeline it is going to look that way because some people drop out at each stage.
One reason you have 87 trackers on a typical web site is that many sites and advertisers figure if they have a large number of trackers they can’t all be wrong.
Site X could show ads to users just fine without third-party cookies but then advertisers would not be so sure about the stats.
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#65I wonder - why didn't the the EU put the burden on user agents a.k.a. web browsers to handle the cookie notices? When I visit a site, before saving any cookies, have my user agent ask me if I want to allow cookies for that site. Could have a default "no cookies" option with a whitelist, or default "yes" with a blacklist. It would have been so much easier, with a far more consistent UX, wouldn't it have? Now we have to put up with 1,000 different flavors of invasive banners, popups, "necessary cookies", etc.
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#66Yes there is. More specifically, it’s the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive 2002/58/EC, which each member state adjusts their own laws to follow. It’s published here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... The relevant part: > Article 5 > Confidentiality of the communications > 3. Member States shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information…
There’s a law, but it’s not a “cookie banner law”. The section you quoted says nothing about banners. The banners are a design decision by the operators.
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, completely foreseeable.
As a reminder, it's the same people in tech we're trusting to build things like chat bots, "AI", cars that try to drive themselves and rockets that try to land themselves... etc. You have to admit that if these same people can't be trusted to follow a simple "do not track" directive, humanity is in big trouble.
Sadly, we are. I didn't ever think of myself as an optimist until I realised just how pessimistic it is possible to become, as I've learned in the last 5 or so years. Now I realise I was quite an optimistic person, at least by comparison with my present self.
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also shows that most people don't care and just want to get on with their day. We know that companies are collecting more data. Now what?
How does it show that? Most people I know are annoyed by this and click on "reject" (if they can find it), but for a lot of non-technical people these banners are just a given because they don't even understand the problem. Doesn't mean they don't care
How many "normies" do you know that stopped visiting websites that track them? I don't know anybody who isn't in my tech bubble who cares, and very few normies who would rather pay money than to give access to their data.
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#69Part of what it means to be "good at regulation" is to anticipate the likely consequences of regulations. So a regulation that says that "businesses must now give away their products for free, unless they honk each customer's nose" will result in a lot of sore noses. Which is basically the case here. Almost all websites make money through ads, or at least keep logs of user activity to help them optimize their website…
Your point is well made, and this is an unfortunate consequence of the regulation (and I enjoyed the analogy). But it isn't necessary to have cookie banners on every website. Github is a moderately complex, user-optimised website, right? https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#70>, Paul Graham came up with the thought, that the EU forces companies to have cookie banners. There is no law for cookie banners. [...] Companies could easily avoid any cookie banner. Just don’t track.
KingOfCoders/amazingcto, of course you are technically correct but Paul Graham wasn't talking about the letter of the law.
Instead, you have to interpret his complaint with the lens of game theory. I.e. The Law of Unintended Consequences that takes into account what companies actually do in response to laws instead of what we hope they will do.
Your blog post focused on good intentions of the law. PG's tweet focused on actual outcome.