French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules • Hacker News Board

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#141

Post by Iv » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 1:38 PM UTC

dsnr wrote: post #101

Iv wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how it works and it works well: let's be fair, the law is not always 100% clear. Some companies try to find the line, have the budget for it, and find it when they get slapped. The goal is not to kill the infringing company, it is to force them to adapt their business models. In France, as we see here in the difference in fines between Amazon and Google, the fines are not a flat rate: repeated offenses lead to…

Normally, they should be allowed to rectify the problems without getting a fine. But if you do that you don’t get the free money. It looks like the tech companies are just being treated as cash cows by governments.

Staying within the law is pretty easy. The fine is for people who want to play the game of "where exactly is the line?"

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#142

Post by Macha » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 2:38 PM UTC

mxmel wrote: post #137

h_anna_h wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse, if you have cookies disabled it will keep asking you for consent over and over even if you decline/accept.

How are you supposed to track that someone has consented if you disable tracking? I’m assuming that declining means you can’t use any form of storage.

"trackingEnabled: 0" does not require consent and lets you acknowledge

"consentId: abc134" then looking that up in or even "consentDenied: exact timestamp" could be used to identify a user so would require consent. I suspect lots of companies want to use the second so they can choose to bug you for [more] consent at a later date, or choose to interpret the first as not allowed in case bugging the user again enough times does get consent.

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#143

Post by Macha » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

kevincox wrote: post #138

zinekeller wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attempts have been done on this, not once (P3P [1]), not twice (DNT [2]), but multiple times (several expired RFCs, GPC [3]). This sounds like the evil bit (RFC 3514 [4]) at this point. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track 3: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/coming-to-a-brow... 4: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3514

The problem with these standards is that they the operators had little if any incentive to follow them. Pairing one of these standard with laws would be a powerful solution with good UX.

Lawmakers are generally hestitant to prescribe specific technological implementations because technology moves faster than laws. Imagine if radio spectrum regulations hadn't applied to wifi because they'd specifically specified TV/radio.

Re: French watchdog fines Google, Amazon for breaching cookies rules

#144

Post by kevincox » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

Macha wrote: post #143

kevincox wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with these standards is that they the operators had little if any incentive to follow them. Pairing one of these standard with laws would be a powerful solution with good UX.

Lawmakers are generally hestitant to prescribe specific technological implementations because technology moves faster than laws. Imagine if radio spectrum regulations hadn't applied to wifi because they'd specifically specified TV/radio.

You can do this somewhat abstractly. By saying "when storing user data it must inform the user agent the purposes of that data using a standard mechanism". Then for http you can bless some RFC and the standard way.

But you are right. It isn't ideal.