Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

legiscope.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 395 posts

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#141

Post by AndroTux »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #78
ryandrake wrote: post #55

People blame the cookie banners themselves or the legislation that "made them necessary" but somehow never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites that make them subject to the law. The "cookie banner problem" exists because it's primarily end users that are shouldering the burden of them, and not the companies. For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software…

They don't technically even need a banner per se, just respect the user's "do not track" browser setting, or put it in a settings screen, or don't use any 3rd party trackers. But a lot of businesses assume they need to ask permission for placing any cookies, which is simply not correct. Local analytics tracking is fine, it's only when the user can be tracked across multiple separate websites that they need explicit p…

And I blame the EU for not making this the law. Just force everyone to adhere to the setting and be done with it. But no, instead we got this bullshit.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#142

Post by Apreche »

ryandrake wrote: post #55

People blame the cookie banners themselves or the legislation that "made them necessary" but somehow never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites that make them subject to the law. The "cookie banner problem" exists because it's primarily end users that are shouldering the burden of them, and not the companies. For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software…

The problem is the law didn't go far enough.

Instead of requiring companies to put up a banner if they did certain tracking activities via cookies the law should have simply outright banned the tracking activities entirely.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#143

Post by lysace »

diggan wrote: post #130
lysace wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also quite a few people (mostly from the north) fighting this idiocy. In general: Southern+Central EU wants to build a new USA. Northern states meanwhile want to reduce the power of the EU. A common market is really the only thing we want. UK had enough and quit.

> In general: Southern+Central EU wants to build a new USA. Northern states meanwhile want to reduce the power of the EU. A common market is really the only thing we want. As someone from the north (specifically Sweden) who now lives in the south (specifically Spain), I'm not sure there is majority in either places, either directions, to state this with confidence. Lots of swedes are happy with EU and wants to make i…

It's weird that you're fixated on that, but yes, I am Swedish and live in Sweden.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#144

Post by r3trohack3r »

etaweb wrote: post #114
r3trohack3r wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know the best way of not having to care about GDPR? Don't store PII. I hear this a lot. As an American that hosts casual personal websites, I can't help but worry that I'm in violation of the GDPR. For example, my router logs connections for debugging. And my NGinx server maintains server logs for debugging. These contain IP addresses. I'm pretty sure those are considered PII under GDPR. And there are a lot of…

Actually, all the cases you mentioned does not necessitate any consent from European users as long as you don't send these data to any third party. The only thing is, if you plan to store logs over time, it should be anonymized after 25 months. It's not that bad.

> it should be anonymized after 25 months

Unless traffic volume causes truncation, turns out I’m not compliant!

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#145

Post by whstl »

ben_w wrote: post #126
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has Facebook ever not been hidden behind a login? Yes. Not sure when they added the loginwall, but it was relatively recently, compared to my birth.

Hm. Could've sworn it had one back in 2009…

I think you two are talking about different things and are both correct. Facebook indeed had a login page back then, but you could use direct links to read public posts. Today it's roughly the same, but when you go to a direct link it shows a "Login Wall" that pesters you to sign up.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#146

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ben_w wrote: post #69
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to Emanuel Macron, who has openly said that the EU might literally die functionally, if not politically, in just 2-3 years due to sheer economic lack of competitiveness. "Our former model is over. We are overregulating and underinvesting. In the two to three years to come, if we follow our classical agenda, we will be out of the market." "If we want clearly to be more competitive and have our place in this…

Link does not support claim "Stupidly high fines happen weekly." I've worked with two firms that have faced GDPR complaints. It's "up to", not "immediately on your first offence".

Yeah, GDPR is tedious. Not expensive nor even onerous.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#147

Post by 6510 »

azinman2 wrote: post #127
diggan wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing this misinformation going around, and it has been going around since almost day 1 of when the directive became known. I'm not sure where it's coming from, or who initially thought it worked like that, but judging by the comments in this submission it seems like a ton of people are very misinformed about how these things actually work.

So how to these things actually work?

Anything goes as long as it is useful for the user.

Funny example: If they chose not to accept your spying cookies you get to set a cookie to store that choice.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#148

Post by Alupis »

whstl wrote: post #135
Alupis wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if that data is "transferred" to a 3rd party for that analysis (aka. a REST call into their API) then you are back to requiring these annoying banners. Or, more common for ecommerce, "transferred" into an advertising algorithm so the business can gain more similar customers. Oh the horror!

What does "for that analysis" refers to? Fraud prevention? If so, it is legitimate interest to do fraud prevention, so there's no need for a consent banner, first or third-party. Naturally you can't go and use this data for a purpose that has no basis under legitimate interest. Another example: Cloudflare is running DDoS prevention under our noses here at HN, for example, but there's no need to ask for consent, even…

> What does "for that analysis"

To understand how customer's shop on my website. Heatmaps, view port, device type, screen resolution, frequency of browsing, where their mouse hovers the most, page dwell time, etc.

These are impossible tasks for most website operators to do themselves.

> For this you do need consent, if you transfer PII. If you don't want a banner you can replace it with a simple checkbox during the checkout process. Not only less hostile, but also more transparent than a banner.

Or... you can just ignore the EU because the EU doesn't matter. You know, like I originally asserted?

> If you don't want a banner you can replace it with a simple checkbox during the checkout process

This is the sort of mindset that crafted this poorly designed regulation in the first place. Most website operators are not going to willingly add a barrier at the final step of a conversion.

If you are going to use my property and resources - it's my rules or don't come. Pretty simple...

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#149

Post by calibas »

guywithahat wrote: post #30

The whole thing is a colossal waste too, it was a law written by people who don't understand tech for special interest groups who don't want to actually make things better. If you don't want a website doing something on your computer, you start with the browser, not the website.

The company that dominates the browser market also makes billions off of tracking people. That might be part of the problem.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#150

Post by dijit »

chris_pie wrote: post #133
dijit wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it, but you’re not in violation if you never pass those logs to anyone. GDPR is intentionally obfuscated and made scary by people who have an interest in others thinking the regulation is onerous and silly (so that it is eventually changed/removed). The regulation is not very hard to read, I would recommend you do it if you haven’t and boils down to: “don’t pass on (process) information without informed consent…

Huh? You're still a personal data processor.

For a start: Section 18 directly indemnifies the GP because they’re not a commercial entity.

Section 49 gives, additionally, specific carve outs for logging even if they were a commercial entity.

Consent is needed to pass logging data to third parties or to process it beyond end user functionality.

Its easier to just read the regulation: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj

Post reply on HN