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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

#221

Post by vman81 »

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…

> It's actually a bit ironic to ask visitors if it's ok to track them. If they say no, you have to track them to at least remember that choice.

Not really - basic functionality like you describe does not require consent, AND any cookie specifying non-consent is in itself anonymous.

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

#222

Post by PinguTS »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #51

Hate this way of thinking where the government (with seemingly good intentions) tries to stop something but leaves a loophole where all our lives are made more tedious and then people defend it saying the companies should just not do it, well we needed the law in the first place so it's a bit silly thinking to suggest they stop doing it after the law, no?. If the cookie law was written properly then it would have jus…

The law does not require a specific implementation. Law is never written to require a specific implementation and should not be written in this way.

Instead law is written in a technology neutral way. It is so neutral that it isn't even called "cookie law". It is called ePrivacy directive. It has only 5 times the mention of "cookie" as an example.

Reference: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=celex%3A...

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

#223

Post by sputr »

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 actual outcome is, from my experience, that tracking has reduced, a lot. When this law was enacted, *we all removed "like on Facebook"* buttons. Remember those? Yeah, we don't see them anymore. Google Analytics also was forced to change, at least a little.

Is there still tracking? Sure. But it's not so blatant anymore. There are hoops one needs to jump through. And that was the point - to make tracking a harder.

None of my projects have cookie banners. Why? Because I use a first party tracking system (Matomo), I anonymize all visits and I respect DNT. It's that easy.

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

#224

Post by shafyy »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #51

Hate this way of thinking where the government (with seemingly good intentions) tries to stop something but leaves a loophole where all our lives are made more tedious and then people defend it saying the companies should just not do it, well we needed the law in the first place so it's a bit silly thinking to suggest they stop doing it after the law, no?. If the cookie law was written properly then it would have jus…

> If the cookie law was written properly then it would have just been a browser setting that had to be respected and this whole thing would have been completely transparent to the end user and they would have benefitted by default.

The law does not mandate websites to display a cookie banner. There are already "Do not track" settings in browsers. A website could choose to honor that setting and don't track you without ever showing you a cookie banner. But most don't.

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

#225

Post by arrowsmith »

master-lincoln wrote: post #118
poszlem wrote: post #27

Putting up a wall in the middle of a busy street and then getting upset when people find ways around it doesn't make sense. The solution is either to remove the wall or ensure it cannot be bypassed. Right now, it's just irritating for the average person and slightly inconveniencing those who actually break the rules. This is the same situation with the cookie banner regulations. If the goal is to eliminate tracking,…

I think the goal was to give citizens the possibility to make informed decisions about where their personal data is being used. If you don't care about tracking, ok. But some do. The EU tried to cater to both audiences which I think is fair. Turns out most people that did not care about tracking would also not consent when they are asked about it specifically and there are no immediately perceived downsides visible.

> informed decisions

And therein lies the false premise that makes the whole thing absurd.

Most people have no idea what "cookies" are, don't understand what difference it makes when you reject them, and are never going to learn - and we shouldn't expect them to! Leave the technical stuff for the programmers.

The cookie law only makes sense if you think that there's any significant overlap between "people who understand what cookies are" and "people who need help with internet privacy", for which I refer you to the Venn diagram in this comic: https://churchm.ag/eu-cookie-law-history/

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

#226

Post by _v7gu »

bananapub wrote: post #180

it is pure HN that there's so many people commenting who 1) didn't bother to read the article 2) didn't bother to read any previous articles and so have continually spread nonsense about what the regulations actually required 3) defending all the companies that decided to be fuckwits with barrages of notices to users instead of actually sincerely trying to reduce their creepy nonsense and then - if anything was left…

I believe quite a lot of them have their paychecks depending on invasive user tracking, so no surprise.

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

#227

Post by toyg »

flipbrad wrote: post #19

Note that this isn't a cookie law, it's also the EU's main anti-malware law. The principle is that no piece of third-party controlled software should write information to your computer/phone, or read info from it, over the Internet, without your prior informed consent (with narrow exceptions for storage/reads that are needed to provide a service you've asked for, or equally narrow functions like load balancing). This…

What do you mean by "the original (now decades-old) law" ? The GDPR is 8 years old.

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

#228

Post by K0nserv »

threemux wrote: post #208
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #51

Hate this way of thinking where the government (with seemingly good intentions) tries to stop something but leaves a loophole where all our lives are made more tedious and then people defend it saying the companies should just not do it, well we needed the law in the first place so it's a bit silly thinking to suggest they stop doing it after the law, no?. If the cookie law was written properly then it would have jus…

As far as I can tell, politicians don't spend much if any time thinking about second and third order consequences. GDPR is but one example, but instances of this abound. The default should be to mistrust new laws. Reagan takes lots of flak on the internet, but he was right on the scariest phrase being "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help". Even worse, this thread is full of armchair lawyers that will confid…

> Even worse, this thread is full of armchair lawyers that will confidently tell you there's no need for cookie banners in particular cases. Nevermind that there's hardly any case law about this and each country seems to interpret it differently. Any actual lawyer would tell you to slap it on there to stay protected.

I bet the number of cases of illegal implementations due to insufficient consent are vastly smaller than the blatantly illegal consent implementations(i.e. those that make it harder to reject consent than accept it). Companies clearly don't care about following the law anyway.

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

#229

Post by fauigerzigerk »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #168
n4r9 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't that argument work both ways? If you interpret the EU's regulation with the "lens of game theory", it is an unintended consequence of aggressive corporate data collection. Not sure why it makes sense to complain about the EU and not the companies.

> Not sure why it makes sense to complain about the EU and not the companies. Unfortunately a non-negligible number of people in tech also have libertarian leanings, with a default “gubmint bad!” position, which makes them easy prey for adtech propaganda.

That's beside the point. If you are in favour of government intervention you should be all the more interested in good policies that have the intended effect.

Bad laws boost libertarianism.

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

#230

Post by clktmr »

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…

I don't want to be tracked either. But if companies can play the law this easily, I think it's a pretty bad law.
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