Live data from Hacker News

Stop whining about “The EU Cookie Policy” and improve your ways

social.wildeboer.net

201–210 of 272 posts

Re: Stop whining about “The EU Cookie Policy” and improve your ways

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the "internet we want", where Ad geniuses will spam you for the same thing you just bought off Amazon and mobile sites turning your phone into a hand warmer with all the ad crap they have to load and all the 3rd party cookies they add

And yet, before GDPR, when all of this was happening, those sites still saw increase in visitors and still made money, because people learned to ignore the ads since the design of the core website was pretty good and ads were not obtrusive to user experience.

I'd say "way before GDPR" we had a local maximum with the initial AdWords experience, where those ads were pretty unobtrusive and there was limited .js spam

"They still made money" sure, on top of externalities.

And now they realize, with some help from Apple and Chrome that this business model has a limit

Re: Stop whining about “The EU Cookie Policy” and improve your ways

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Superficially, the banners appeared due to how the law was made and how it's implemented. The noble intention is one thing and the pragmatic reality is another. It's correct to blame the businesses for creating the banners but also unfair to treat the matter as if the businesses and the EU are on a level playing field. The EU makes laws - it has cheat codes to achieve what it wants. It's like defensive driving. You m…

> Superficially, the banners appeared due to how the law was made So stop being superficial and read this 7-year old law. I wonder if you could point to me where it talks about cookie banners

And yet it's been 7 years and the banners still exist.

Re: Stop whining about “The EU Cookie Policy” and improve your ways

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Superficially, the banners appeared due to how the law was made So stop being superficial and read this 7-year old law. I wonder if you could point to me where it talks about cookie banners

And yet it's been 7 years and the banners still exist.

Because the industry doesn't want to give up on tracking and siphoning user data.

Re: Stop whining about “The EU Cookie Policy” and improve your ways

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That one's the pretty much the optimal implementation though. It's strictly performative, they're setting session and tracking cookies without consent. Whatever you click on their "consent" (or if you click at all) is irrelevant and has no effect on the cookies being set. It's been that way for a long time and nobody cares (I've reported it before and never got a reply). It's a classic "do as I say, not as I do". R…

After navigating for a couple of pages in incognito (without clicking on any option on the banner) I see two cookies set: one which I suspect tracks if I accepted cookies or not, and one that tracks the fact that I closed the EU/European Commission survey. I'm not sure what you're seeing, or if you're thinking that these two are not OK to be set.

Pure chromium private window, zero interaction with the page, first load, they're all set via JS.

_pk_ses.c9513597-70e6-4b84-80c5-36f9dddf8c7c.9f33: * (Expires 2023-04-14T11:55:32.000Z)

_pk_id.c9513597-70e6-4b84-80c5-36f9dddf8c7c.9f33: 067c09531fc49591.1681471532.1.1681471532.1681471532. (Expires 2024-05-11T11:25:32.000Z)

cck1: %7B%22cm%22%3Afalse%2C%22all1st%22%3Afalse%2C%22closed%22%3Afalse%7D (Expires 2023-10-11T11:25:32.000Z)

Re: Stop whining about “The EU Cookie Policy” and improve your ways

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it's been 7 years and the banners still exist.

Because the industry doesn't want to give up on tracking and siphoning user data.

7 years of complaining about it hasn't changed that. Do you think another 7 years will be more effective?

Alternatively, the EU could change the laws. Or enforce the existing ones.

Re: Stop whining about “The EU Cookie Policy” and improve your ways

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is to allow someone the option to defeat all fingerprinting if they want to. The consequences of that are up to the companies - if they don't want to sell you something because you are anonymous, they have the right to reject your browser requests. Thats an important cornerstone of capitalism. Even with limits on collection/processing of personal data, because the legislation was made by non technical peopl…

> if they don't want to sell you something because you are anonymous, they have the right to reject your browser requests. Thats an important cornerstone of capitalism. Maybe in a perfect world where healthy competition is a thing. But (potentially due to under-regulation elsewhere) that's not what we have in practice - for a lot of services, you only really have a choice between a handful of providers, and you're ou…

Article 21 of the GDPR allows an individual to object to processing personal information for marketing or non-service related purposes.[24] This means the data controller must allow an individual the right to stop or prevent controller from processing their personal data.

There are some instances where this objection does not apply. For example, if:

1. Legal or official authority is being carried out 2. "Legitimate interest", where the organisation needs to process data in order to provide the data subject with a service they signed up for 3. A task being carried out for public interest.

2 is the key here. Make an entire ML model that generates a website layout based on the request, claim its core business logic, oh and btw, it just happens to load advertisements from companies based on this contextual data, but that contextual data has nothing to do with the user. Look, we don't store any advertising cookies or session data, don't request any either, and here is our model. Investigate it as much as you want, and we don't have the training data anymore because we delete that.

Re: Stop whining about “The EU Cookie Policy” and improve your ways

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "many, many" I take that to mean "a substantial proportion" and I think you may be making the mistake of estimating your proportions from the population of people in tech forums, rather than from the global population of internet users.

I know next to nothing about the "global population of internet users". I know a fair bit about the EU population and I can assure you that it's a very substantial proportion.

I still suspect your sample is heavily biased towards university-educated / middle class people.

Re: Stop whining about “The EU Cookie Policy” and improve your ways

#208
post #43

>Tech bros love to whine about "The EU cookie policy" that simply doesn't exist the way they imagine it. All these popups are the most radical way to interpret the explicit consent demanded by regulations when sending data to a 3rd party. An ongoing provocation by the ad/tracker industry to blame their ruthless data hoarding on the EU. The official EU website has one of these annoying pop-ups. Are they part of the pr…

> has one of these annoying pop-ups You mean a footer. With a 'Only essential cookies' option. A bit annoying, yes, and other commenters have mentioned the reason for it. So nothing in your face like "We care about (selling) your privacy"

It is still in your face. It takes a large part of a mobile screen.

If they care enough about privacy they would only use “essential cookies” and get rid of the others.

Re: Stop whining about “The EU Cookie Policy” and improve your ways

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need cookies for that

Although these things are called "cookie banner", it doesn't matter whether you need/use cookies or do it server-side. It's about the data that is being processed and the intent, not the technical implementation.

And duration. E.g. session cookie holding serialized shopping cart data is ok, but longer term storage is not ok.

Re: Stop whining about “The EU Cookie Policy” and improve your ways

#210
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what happens when you add regulations to an industry of small players who can’t afford to spend time or money in understanding these things

The incessant "think of the small businesses" is becoming the new "think of the children". It's easier for small businesses to comply with GDPR.

This is hilariously wrong.

Small companies have less code and complexity but don't have internal resources specialised in law, security and web development available to fix things.

They usually also don't have the money to bring outsiders to do it for them.

Post reply on HN