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

GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

iccl.ie

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 433 posts

Re: GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

#231

Post by rhn_mk1 »

colechristensen wrote: post #97
alextheparrot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure how true this is, many types of data have diminishing returns after a few months. I’d be surprised if they lost money compared to not using these methods —- they’ve just lost the tail of incremental value.

Millions of Google Analytics customers with suddenly blank histories going back (years?) will notice quite a bit, whole classes of employees basically just make charts about historical performance. Attribution in advertising is something which can last months for some products, and it's doubtful that a large proportion of companies import from GA and will lose their ability to gauge current performance compared to th…

Cynically, I expect this will go the way of tthe cookie popups themselves: the law will be blamed, not the transgressor.

Re: GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

#232

Post by endisneigh »

alkonaut wrote: post #223
endisneigh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advertising companies are ruining the internet for everyone, some people are just too unaware to realise it. Sounds like projection. Though I'd agree that most internet users don't like ads, what's true is that most internet users don't like paying for things. Using YouTube as an example, the most popular site on the internet, the vast majority of people do not pay for YouTube premium even though it's available. At…

If a site offers the choice between either funding via "good" (Non tracking, no malware etc) ads, and a fee, then I'm completely happy with their business model. A lot of sites however, don't do this. Of course, the reality is that if they _did_ use "good" ads, then the free version wouldn't make enough money (at least not in today's ad market). So either the free version couldn't exist, OR it would need to be subsid…

I disagree with what you’re saying. Basically your point is that most content on the internet should go away because you don’t like ads.

Good luck with that. Instead, you should treat all the sites that have ads as inaccessible and personally use the small percentage that fit your needs.

Everyone wins.

Re: GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

#233

Post by alkonaut »

parkingrift wrote: post #172
endisneigh wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people are choosing "spyware" over a "paid" product, perhaps they just don't care about data collection that much. Isn't that the logical conclusion? Objectively ads have added more money into the internet economy than ever before. Curious where you're getting your numbers. 20 years ago "YouTuber" wasn't even a profession. The idea some rando with a microphone and a camera could make millions was unheard of. It's…

You're conflating ads with spyware. Ads have existed as long as commerce has existed. Ads don't need spyware.

I think it needs repeating every time this discussion comes up: the discussion isn't about ads, it's about "bad" ads (tracking, trading PII, ads with malware...).

The group that is against ads including images on the sides of buses (basically the argument is usually something along the lines of that it encourages unnecessary consumption or similar) is so small as to be irrelevant. You should consider "ads" in the context of this discussion to be "bad ads", where the limit for what constitutes "bad" is of course different from person to person, but for the sae of discussion assume it is "bad enough".

Re: GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

#234

Post by Nextgrid »

cstross wrote: post #204
Nextgrid wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the IAB is essentially volunteering to be the scapegoat to shield everyone else. 250k is peanuts compared to how much the industry has made breaching the GDPR over the last 4 years.

IAB's business model is broken at this point. The EU's point is that you can't rules-lawyer your way around GDPR violations by outsourcing the lawbreaking to a paid scapegoat company: having ruled the practices to be essentially illegal, this is going to end up being kicked up a level to the big advertising corporations themselves (by which I mean: Google, Amazon, Microsoft).

> this is going to end up being kicked up a level to the big advertising corporations themselves

When? In a century?

It took them years to reach a conclusion that even a layman skim-reading the GDPR would reach in an hour.

Re: GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

#235

Post by 9dev »

endisneigh wrote: post #219
Nextgrid wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm extrapolating based on what I see on the front page and in suggestions as well as other social networks. Most of this content is only there to solicit an ad impression, not enough people would pay money for it. > That being said, who are we to say what's valuable? We can infer this based on whether enough people pay for the content. There's a reason you don't see a Patreon or other way of paying for the vast majo…

> Most of this content is only there to solicit an ad impression, not enough people would pay money for it. Exactly. There’s no issue. > There's a reason you don't see a Patreon or other way of paying for the vast majority of clickbait content. The vast majority of content, clickbait or not doesn’t have a patreon to begin with. Most patreon have social media presence which includes ads. Sounds like the worst of both…

> > Most of this content is only there to solicit an ad impression, not enough people would pay money for it.

> Exactly. There’s no issue.

Except all the work and energy wasted on creating trash content only intended for ad impressions? The world would be better off without it.

Re: GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

#236

Post by Macha »

kmlx wrote: post #228
phh wrote: post #6

My favorite part is: > All data collected through the TCF must now be deleted by the more than 1,000 companies that pay IAB Europe to use the TCF. This includes Google’s, Amazon’s and Microsoft’s online advertising businesses. It's not just that they need to find new ways to screw users. It's that since they screwed users, they also must lose their ill-gained data. Which will probably be a nice deterrent against them…

> All data collected through the TCF there is no data collected via TCF: https://github.com/InteractiveAdvertisingBureau/GDPR-Transpa... CMPs are the popups that save the preferences and thus enable the collection of the data. IAB only provides a spec.

This kind of "but technically" is not going to go well for them if that's what they try. Technically the CMPs don't collect the data either, the ads do and the website controls how the CMP relates to ad loading.

The TCF is a spec, the industry agreed on this spec, built implementations and used it as justification of tracking. I think it's fair to call data collected by ads loaded under the idea that a valid implementation of the spec was proof of GDPR consent as "data collected through the TCF".

Anyway, this is the press release, not the ruling. See C.2 of the ruling if you want to nitpick the way this is actually being ordered.

https://www.gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit.be/publications/b...

Re: GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

#237

Post by endisneigh »

Nextgrid wrote: post #217
endisneigh wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a bit circular. People would rather use a free service than a paid service. So long as free services exist it will be hard or impossible for paid services to exist or thrive. Of course. If a paid product wants to thrive it needs to be better. People do use paid search engines, email, maps, etc. most people don’t because most people don’t value it that much. > There's no reason that we should have to make th…

> paid search engines, [...], maps Can you find me one? The only one I know about is Kagi which is in beta and invite-only. The problem with the current status-quo is that as long as advertising powered by illicit data collection is possible in practice, it's not viable for a paid service to compete. > Just change it for yourself and then you’re good. It doesn't matter what you do if ad-tech scum will track you anywa…

Try out Neeva in addition to Kagi. If you pay and get your friends to, it’ll compete.

> It doesn't matter what you do if ad-tech scum will track you anyway

Stay away from sites that use trackers and you won’t be tracked. I recommend turning off JavaScript and sticking to plain text sites.

Re: GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

#238

Post by saithir »

slig wrote: post #210
oezi wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the good part is you can just decline to consent. Because under GDPR if they need consent at all (that is they really don't need the data), then you can decline.

Can the site deny your access then?

Much like the few US-based news sites that already decided to just not bother and show me the "you're coming from the EU and we can't be bothered to not collect your data" blank page instead.

At which point I'm free to decide I wasn't interested in their content anyway.

Re: GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

#239

Post by heavenlyblue »

Nextgrid wrote: post #230
rkangel wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They lose all the data though. They may have avoided some name smearing but it's the data that they really want.

I'd argue that the data has already been integrated into ML models or mixed in such a way that there's no way to even tell where the data originated from. While the logical conclusion would be to just delete any data they can't prove a legitimate origin for, I very much doubt this is going to happen. Most importantly, tens of billions have already been made using this ill-gotten data.

Or just force all models to be deleted that had any input of that data in the first place. If they don't do that in practice let the whistleblowers do their job in exposing the companies.

Re: GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful

#240

Post by Nextgrid »

endisneigh wrote: post #219
Nextgrid wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm extrapolating based on what I see on the front page and in suggestions as well as other social networks. Most of this content is only there to solicit an ad impression, not enough people would pay money for it. > That being said, who are we to say what's valuable? We can infer this based on whether enough people pay for the content. There's a reason you don't see a Patreon or other way of paying for the vast majo…

> Most of this content is only there to solicit an ad impression, not enough people would pay money for it. Exactly. There’s no issue. > There's a reason you don't see a Patreon or other way of paying for the vast majority of clickbait content. The vast majority of content, clickbait or not doesn’t have a patreon to begin with. Most patreon have social media presence which includes ads. Sounds like the worst of both…

There is an issue.

The content is clearly not valuable enough for people to pay for it, and in fact it's called "clickbait" for a reason because people clearly feel cheated by what they got as opposed to what they were led to believe they were clicking on.

In a market where consumers of the content pay for it, this wouldn't fly. In a market corrupted by advertising, this flies and the by-product is wasted time, computing resources, pricing out good content from the market (as you can't compete with free) and the risks associated with advertising (the ads aren't properly reviewed, scams, spam and malware can and does fall through the cracks) and data collection.

This also subverts the entire market and is the reason you can't even buy a good TV or appliance anymore without going for niche, commercial-grade products. Do you want to live in a society where you literally can't buy a TV that doesn't spy on you or show ads?

Advertising in its current form is absolutely out of control and ends up being a tax that we all pay for both in time (whether watching the ads or playing cat & mouse with countermeasures such as AdBlock, Pi-Hole, etc) as well as money (as it's ultimately part of the price of the goods we all buy).

Post reply on HN