391–400 of 621 posts
Wow, finally. This would be a major quality of life update for browsing the web. As others have stated, not all sites merit the same preferences. Hopefully they can adapt a middleground of default settings with the ability to customize site by site.
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I believe myself to be fairly well-informed, and usually accept the cookies, because I don’t foresee any potential harms, and it helps the people running the website. I am worried about many things like phishing and hacking/data leaks, but the valuable data isn’t cookie-related. What harm are you worried about?
Tracking usually happens across websites, meaning the information is shared with third parties outside the people running the website where you accepted the cookies. Knowing your interests, behavior and preferences makes you prone to manipulation. The selection of information shown to you will be crafted such as it maximizes engagement. For example, showing you information that upsets you, in order to get you to reac…
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Because it doesn't mean anything specific and breaks entire business models (merely logging that you landed from an ad click and seeing if you check out counts as 'tracking,' doesn't it?) if interpreted purely literally. So, the only way to treat it is to either ignore it or to just send back an error code and message that says "Sorry, having some tracking is the condition to get this free content. Accept or don't."…
>breaks entire business models So do car alarms. I'm not convinced this is a business model I want to exist. We had an internet before it, and Google, and Facebook. I'm increasingly sad we can't return to it.
And I'd gladly trade today's BS for any version of "The Internet" pre-2007.
But the "Before" Internet wasn't some natural sustainable state.
Before 1997 or so, "the Internet" was being paid for by academic institutions and big companies, and wasn't really all that commercial at all. It was also pretty tiny and blessedly simple. Honestly this version is the most achievable (re-creatable?) today since we can set up indie websites much easier today than we could then. Instead of using your free webspace from your university or employer, 20 of us could share a $5 a month instance, and link to each other's webpages, and add an IRC server to that instance just for fun.
In the 1998-2007 era, the Internet got a lot bigger, but was also still pretty fun and not that enshittified, but that's just because it was being paid for by VC money being burned.
Today we are where we are in terms of business model[1] because Google and Facebook achieved great success with ad-based business models because of the ability to target ads better, and because consumers of The Internet have spoken, loudly, with their closed wallets. They've said "We will only pay for content if it's All The Music and ~$10 a month flat rate, or if it's a big/interesting enough video on-demand service and under $20 a month. We'll never pay for news or text content of any kind." So, the businesses with other types of content do what the public wants them to do: have cost-free content whose access is conditional on being advertised to very annoyingly, or they marginalize themselves with paywalls, subscribed to by only a small minority of users.
[1] i'm setting aside the non-business aspects of our mess, namely the poison that social media, 'engagement' optimization, and ragebait-as-news has wrought on society.
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I believe myself to be fairly well-informed, and usually accept the cookies, because I don’t foresee any potential harms, and it helps the people running the website. I am worried about many things like phishing and hacking/data leaks, but the valuable data isn’t cookie-related. What harm are you worried about?
These popups aren't about cookies but really about spying. It seems you have nothing to hide. I understand: I also don't. However, the problem with spying is not about individual secrets but about the society and democracy. Lack of privacy harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to tar…
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It just won’t fly in court. Full stop. There are perhaps other defenses to be raised, like unconscionable terms, but not that one.
I think that means one of three things: the court system is broken, you are wrong, or I failed to be clear and you misunderstood me. So, to be clear, if a company buries or obscures terms while making it seem like they have presented them, so you agree without reading the actual terms, you cannot defend yourself by explaining that situation?
But anyway. What exactly do you mean by “buried or obscured”?
As I said above, if the parties cannot be said to have an agreement because the terms of the agreement itself are inscrutable, then that would probably result in no contract being formed, or the terms at issue interpreted in the light most favorable to the non-drafting party. Like if the terms were presented in so small a font that only someone with a microscope could have read them, or it was written cryptographically or is gibberish.
Basically you have to successfully argue that no reasonable person could have read and understood the agreement. You’re unlikely to prevail if you argue only that you, the individual, did not. (Unless the court also finds you are incapable of entering into any contract because you’re a minor, are non compos mentis, etc.)
The other approach to killing the cookie banner is simply to declare that such a thing cannot constitute “informed consent”. (Perhaps: “ticking a checkbox and/or clicking a button cannot constitute informed consent”; and see what they try next.) From a factual perspective, I honestly think that shouldn’t be controversial: it’s well-understood that very few people actually read those things, they just want to get them…
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Not wrong in the EU, you don't need to ask for consent nor notify about cookies which are required to make the site functional. Tracking and ads don't fall under that though, which is why every site these days does need to ask for your consent.
> strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.
One very ignored qualifier here is "information society service". This is defined in Directive 2015/1535 and one of the requirements is that the service is "normally provided for remuneration". That is usually understood to mean that the service needs to be tied to provider's economic activity. This effectively excludes, for example, public authorities websites which are for their own public duties. It does however include e.g. ad supported websites.
And yes, I'm aware that many national implementations actually miss that qualifier. That can save the non-commercial private sector websites, but public authorities do not benefit from Member States failing to transpose Directive correctly.
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What tracking does HN do?
A fair bit: https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
> Hacker News Information: If you create a Hacker News account (ID and profile), we do not collect any Personal Information unless you choose to provide your email address and/or information in the "about" field (“HN Information”). Your submissions to, and comments you make on, the Hacker News site are not Personal Information and are not "HN Information" as defined in this Privacy Policy.
The other approach to killing the cookie banner is simply to declare that such a thing cannot constitute “informed consent”. (Perhaps: “ticking a checkbox and/or clicking a button cannot constitute informed consent”; and see what they try next.) From a factual perspective, I honestly think that shouldn’t be controversial: it’s well-understood that very few people actually read those things, they just want to get them…
The solution for the problem caused by regulation is more regulation. Sure, we didn't anticipate the negative consequences the first dozen times, but this time there will absolutely not be any unanticipated consequences.
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Perhaps I am overly optimistic in thinking this is just incompetence.
Yes, you are. The legislative process around EPD/EPR fully anticipated the malicious compliance and it became a back-and-forth political football long before anything was passed. The legislators were never dumb and the corporations were always greedy+powerful.
There is nothing stopping a website from using cookies regardless of the banner. If they are outside EU jurisdiction then there won't be any consequences either.
The legislators were and are dumb. They have wasted an enormous amount of collective time for no benefit. Big corporations continued doing what they were doing and nefarious third parties could still track you.