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

Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

amazingcto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 662 posts

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

#291

Post by joenot443 »

leononame wrote: post #45
poszlem wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also shows that most people don't care and just want to get on with their day. We know that companies are collecting more data. Now what?

How does it show that? Most people I know are annoyed by this and click on "reject" (if they can find it), but for a lot of non-technical people these banners are just a given because they don't even understand the problem. Doesn't mean they don't care

The close to million users now on https://www.stilldontcareaboutcookies.com/ suggests that there's a pretty sizable amount of people that care less about the philosophy of European data laws and more about just getting on with their day.

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

#292

Post by foobarian »

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…

The fees example is maybe apples to oranges. The fees are a problem because they subvert the pricing information signals needed for the free market. The problem is not the fact that they are charged, the problem is that they are not included in an upfront price display. Were they included in the total upfront price and never specified the users should not care - it's not their business how a company spends their money.

But I suppose that was just an example you picked to illustrate the industry's malicious compliance, and not the main point, in which case fair enough. :-)

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

#293

Post by throwawaysleep »

CipherThrowaway wrote: post #188
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…

Agree. How much corporate propaganda are people consuming that legislators are seen as wholly responsible for the bad behavior and malicious compliance actions of corporations? What does it say about the relationship between businesses and consumers that the first response to this bad behavior is to shout "look what you made them do!" Seemingly it is everyone's fault except the bad actors themselves.

Many of us had no real problem with the ad-supported web in the first place. I was happy with the status quo.

So yes, I do blame the government as I would be fine returning to the prior state.

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

#294

Post by Sponge5 »

kevmo314 wrote: post #231
KingOfCoders wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(author here) I'm a fan of second-order thinking and unintended consequences, so I'm with you there. How would you frame a "don't track people without consent" without unintended consequences? The article tries to make the point (perhaps fails), that companies do this intentionally to get the "consent" of people against their will, therefor running the tight line of breaking the law without breaking it.

Fines for data breaches is one idea? If we want to disincentivize data hoarding, the main cost to data hoarding is data breaches, so we could perhaps penalize that. This would have a different issue, specifically companies would no longer self-report data breaches, but it's just an idea. There are alternative approaches to getting to "don't track people without consent" that aren't a toothless stick by making it more…

> the main cost to data hoarding is data breaches

... the main cost at the moment. I think we as a society are very close to a tracking/data tax.

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

#295

Post by denton-scratch »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #152
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…

(author here) I'm a fan of second-order thinking and unintended consequences, so I'm with you there. How would you frame a "don't track people without consent" without unintended consequences? The article tries to make the point (perhaps fails), that companies do this intentionally to get the "consent" of people against their will, therefor running the tight line of breaking the law without breaking it.

> How would you frame a "don't track people without consent" without unintended consequences?

Drop the consent requirement? I.e. just don't track people. No third-party cookies, first-party only, and only for the correct operation of the site.

It's not the cookies that people object to, it's the tracking. Tracking provides no benefits to visitors. If there were no tracking risk, there would be no need to require consent.

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

#296

Post by lynx23 »

CipherThrowaway wrote: post #188
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…

Agree. How much corporate propaganda are people consuming that legislators are seen as wholly responsible for the bad behavior and malicious compliance actions of corporations? What does it say about the relationship between businesses and consumers that the first response to this bad behavior is to shout "look what you made them do!" Seemingly it is everyone's fault except the bad actors themselves.

If it only were that simple. When the GDPR came out, a lot of confusion and misunderstanding ensued. Not only regarding the damn cookie banner. Even totally legitimate health-care providers started to collect signatures to be on the safe side. I still rememeber receiving a basic GDPR training where we were told that opt-out/signing is only necessary if the entity is planning to do weird stuff with your data. IOW, if someone wants you to sign, they plan a bad move. Then my bank wanted a signature. And a month later, one of my healthcare providers wanted a signature. After a chat with him, I learnt that his lawyer told him to collect the signatures just in case, and made him believe that if someone doesn't sign, that is a problem.

So now we have this situation where providers were trained to play the GDPR in such a way that they will never have a problem, no matter what they actually do with the data.

And consumers are pissed because they are made to sign things which essentially reduce their rights...

And if someone (like me) thinks the EU did a half-assed job there, the downvotes rain in.

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

#297

Post by _v7gu »

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…

Cases != law in continental Europe. The law is the law. I don't think you're in a position to call others armchair lawyers

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

#298

Post by denton-scratch »

mlrtime wrote: post #261
KingOfCoders wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(author here) I'm a fan of second-order thinking and unintended consequences, so I'm with you there. How would you frame a "don't track people without consent" without unintended consequences? The article tries to make the point (perhaps fails), that companies do this intentionally to get the "consent" of people against their will, therefor running the tight line of breaking the law without breaking it.

Probably the same way most laws end up. We see the unintended consequences, then revise the law to counter the consequences. Thus the cat/mouse game continues. An idea could be that the tracking has to be opt-in AND the webpage cannot stop critical use of the page as part of the opt-in process. Then another round of consequences.. rinse repeat...

> An idea could be that the tracking has to be opt-in

Why would anyone opt-in? Tracking provides zero benefits to the site visitor.

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

#299

Post by reactordev »

I'm glad someone said this on a broader scale than I could reach. This is exactly why we have cookie consent pop-ups. Implemented by Admiral Tech or whatever. It's disgusting and is hostile to the open web.

Even disagreeing now forces you into another full-page pop-up where you have to itemize your disagreement before clicking on Reject All.

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

#300

Post by FredPret »

sputr wrote: post #223
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.…

It’s not the difficulty level that people object to.

It’s a combination of two things:

1) the law comes to the rest of the world from Europe. We (rest of the world) didn’t vote in the people who brought it. We’ve had quite enough of Europeans making rules for the rest of the world in the past few centuries thank you very much.

2) GDPR encodes an expectation that may or may not be common in the EU, but certainly isn’t common elsewhere. I don’t have any expectation of privacy when I walk in public or when I give any information at all to a business. My solution to this is: a) I wear pants outside, and b) I don’t give out private information. Whether the business ecosystem knows their age and purchasing patterns is largely immaterial to virtually everyone I’ve ever met.

And don’t show me a survey showing people don’t like it - if you prime people with the question, of course they will respond that way. They know their info is being gathered, and they just don’t think it’s as big a deal as GDPR would like it to be.

Post reply on HN