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Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

amazingcto.com

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Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#141

Post by leereeves »

miracle2k wrote: post #81
nolok wrote: post #17

Imagine a market in which companies charge a lot of hidden fees behind their customers' back, and users are not happy when they realize after the fact. The law is updated to say you are not allowed to charge the user a fee unless you tell him in advance. Companies with tons of hidden fees decide to keep them but force you to read all the fees on every page of the menu before you can see the rest of the text, in the m…

> On this issue in the group that complain about the cookie law there are some people who are very wrong on purpose because it's in their interest, and some people who are very wrong because they genuinely don't understand the position they're defending, complaining about being made aware of the fee, instead of the fees themselves or the fact that the companies hide them if not forced by law. The reality is that I (a…

> people who compare a website wanting to know the number of their visitors to "hidden fees" are kind of being ridiculous

Is counting visitors all that sites are doing with tracking info?

They're not selling it to ad brokers, insurance companies, governments? They're not matching your name, address, and phone number with your web activity (including sexual interests, "anonymous" embarrassing stories, health concerns, etc)?

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#142

Post by pcl »

> “I’m not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Ask your data protection specialist.”

Ironically, the author felt compelled to announce that he’s not providing legal advice. There is also no need for him to make that disclaimer. But hey, why take the risk?

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#143

Post by GTP »

jasode wrote: post #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 Uni…

I see your point, but then to have a constructive conversation Paul Graham should also give his two cents about how the law could be improved. I don't know him, so I'll ask here: did he do that?

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#144

Post by master-lincoln »

zpeti wrote: post #18
dTal wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your business is "doing sketchy shit with people's data", and the regulatory hammer just came down on you... well, yeah.

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.

Of course this is "doing sketchy shit with people's data".

Selling my personal info to external companies so that they can manipulate me easier is sketchy in my eyes if I don't consent

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#145

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

PaulHoule wrote: post #64
chgs wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Sure, but is that situation worse than other traditional forms of advertising? Are we just saying that the advertising industry is so greedy that they want so much more of the pie than they used to have, that we should enable them?

> Site X could show ads to users just fine without third-party cookies but then advertisers would not be so sure about the stats.

Feels like 99% of people would prefer this. Maybe advertising becomes less effective, but it may actually become more effective if it leads to more ads being visible since they are no longer ad-blocked.

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#146

Post by hikingsimulator »

jasode wrote: post #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 Uni…

The blog clearly works from the actual outcome lense. It's repeated. Several times. The companies could just not track.

The actual outcome is that they do want to track, and use adversarial patterns and malicious compliance to twist your arm and "force consent."

Paul Graham is still wrong.

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#148

Post by vbo »

With or without EU regulations, client software could decide to discard all cookies once the user has "left" the site. Or it could block cross domain cookies of its own volition. Yes, it doesn't fix the fundamental issue, but it does address it for those that want to fix it against the tide. Yes, it comes with drawbacks, but it is what it is so long as we don't collectively move towards paying for content, ideally in micro form.

I sometimes come across articles in local publications that ask me to subscribe - dude, seriously? Do you expect me to subscribe to an Alaskan publication when I live half the world away and could not care less of what happens there, but just want to read this one article that seems interesting?

So instead we have ad funded websites that have to do what they have to do in order to make some money and keep publishing whatever it is they publish. Hence tracking cookies.

Everyone's needs would be better served if we could pay for content the same way we did back in the day of printed newspapers. You buy today's edition and you get today's edition and no one except the newsagent is tracking you (if you happen to regularly buy the newspaper from her, she'll remember you, and she may even suggest additional newspapers to buy but it's implied, right? we dislike machine tracking, not humans remembering our buying habits).

Alas, we don't have that. We have intrusive tracking and subscriptions, even though technically it's something we could build in weeks (lest the payment companies didn't make it unfeasible, for their own benefit).

And people do sometimes try to figure it out. Bundles come to mind. Everything -- except micro transactions allowing you to purchase just. this. article. And while micro transactions don't exclude tracking, companies are more likely (is this wishful thinking?) to be careful with a paying customer's experience than with freeloaders, which is what we insist of being, while putting up demands as to what publishers can do with our data.

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#149

Post by smhg »

arbuge wrote: post #89

"Companies could easily avoid any cookie banner. Just don’t track." It seems like a point dear to the author's heart, given the way he highlights this and puts it in bold at the top of the article. But while it sounds good on the surface, it doesn't take much digging to show it's silly. If you store any kind of data about a visitor to make their life more convenient, is that tracking? Shopping carts? Notification pre…

> If you store any kind of data about a visitor to make their life more convenient, is that tracking? Shopping carts? Notification preferences? etc.

If it is crucial to provide the service or the service is explicitely requested by the user (i'd argue a shopping cart is), I think you don't need consent (see Article 5 of Directive 2002/58/EC).

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#150

Post by skrebbel »

I agree with this. We recently removed all tracking (eg google analytics) from our homepage because we didn't want to have a cookie banner. The result: everything is going fine. Turns out we didn't need the tracking at all. Should've done it way sooner.

I hope the EU sticks to their guns. A few years ago, there was a flood of HN posts about optimizing initial page loads etc, because research showed that even a few hundred milliseconds slower load times measurably affected how often people clicked on buttons named "buy" and "sign up" and the likes. Then GDPR happened, and this somehow became a non-topic and instead we get 3-screen tall "TrustArc" modals that take half a second responding to a click? This makes no sense at all!

I hope, and believe, that it's just a matter of time before people re-discover that yes, actually, if you make a page fast and nice and friendly, you get more clicks/signups/purchases/$kpi, and that cookie banners hurt business.

If this is true, then what we're seeing now is just the initial path of least resistance: do what we did before, plus do what the lawyers tell us to. As the key GDPR rules have gradually become "common knowledge", we ought to be seeing gradually more sites switch their approach and focus on fast UX again, ie, no cookie banners and thus no tracking. Sure, it's work, and I bet the math doesn't always work out against tracking, but I bet often enough it does.

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