601–610 of 621 posts
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I've seen people argue, with a straight face, that they prefer to get ads that are "relevant to them". Including here on Hacker News.
I don't trust anyone who is against "relevant ads," because I always think what they want isn't "irrelevant ads," they want "no ads." But no ads isn't an option.
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>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.
Let me be clear, I can't stand the social-media industrial complex and the advertising universe. I've seen the bottom that we've raced to, with absolute bullshit popping up everywhere and entire sites full of slop with clickbait "headlines" just rigged to get ad impressions. 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. Bef…
You should definitely consider supporting your favourite news sources directly. ft.com, economist.com, lwn.net, etc. Maybe your outlook might change regarding whether they are marginalising themselves or making sure their financial motivations are more correctly aligned with high quality output.
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Sloppy, non-privacy-preserving "analytics" set up by some communications intern ≠ malice. They can mean well and still do a poor job. True privacy on the internet is notoriously hard.
Sorry, no. Code doesn't magically go from the intern's workstation to live. If the chain of incompetence is that long, then the most generous read is that they don't care
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One of our sites that don't use any kind of tracking or cookies other then a site preference cookie, got so many complaints that we had to put up a cookie banner that simply says "we do not use any tracking cookies"...
Who complained what?
Because of the legal wording of these support tickets, the support team would often raise them to dev or legal as well, and since this is a non-revenue driving part of our business (the reason we don't track in the first place) we decided to just put up a cookie banner explaining why we don't need a cookie banner.
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…
> it’s well-understood that very few people actually read those things, they just want to get them out of the way. This is a jaw-drop moment for me every single time I observe someone else using the web and quickly clicking "accept" on every single cookie banners that pops up, without ever wasting a second even reading what they're accepting. It's mind boggling to me. Sure, I'm in IT, so surely I'm more aware of data…
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It’s not about cookies. It’s about what the site is allowed to do with your data. Cookies are an implementation detail. It’s baffling we’re having this misunderstanding on this site in 2026 still.
Is there any other way to get that data? It's clearly about cookies but it's specifically about tracking cookies.
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Supercookies: https://www.comparitech.com/identity-theft-protection/superc... > https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/new-cookie-technologie... > https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh > Browser fingerprinting / Panopticlick: https://ssd.eff.org/module/what-fingerprinting > https://panopticlick.org/ > On-device identifiers --- Google AdID (GAID), Apple IDFA, etc.: https://developer.transmitsecurity.com/…
Sure but these are all the same thing as cookies. And BYW, browser headers can even be a violation if it's determined that you are using them for tracking users in a way that violates ePrivacy demands. It's still a cookies thing.
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changing IP is not really enough for privacy, there is many ways to fingerprint your machine/browser and uniquely identify you across networks https://creepjs.org/checker
No, but it's the obvious starting point. You can then put additional laws on top banning fingerprinting out of band (if you care about window dressing), fund development of anti-fingerprinting technologies, fund Tor, run exit nodes in a transparent and publicly auditable fashion, etc. It's not hard to make privacy work when you are the government rather than working against a hostile one.