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

legiscope.com

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

#31

Post by diggan »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #23
diggan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this was a predictable response to a stupid rule It was predictable that ultimately people would blame the regulation instead of the companies? Not sure I understand what you mean, and even if you meant what I think you meant, not sure what the point is? People blame all sorts of things all the time... Edit since you've added more to your comment > Proving compliance with GDPR is tedious That's my point. No need to…

[flagged]

Except it's not that black and white. If you follow the regulation too loosely, you get warnings. If you then ignore the problem, you'd get bigger problems. But no one is gonna put a "10% of global turnover" as a fine immediately.

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

#32

Post by Alupis »

diggan wrote: post #5

Correct URL: https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-... > This situation calls for an urgent revision of the ePrivacy Directive Shame companies cannot live without tracking cookies, and shame that the blame somehow end up on the regulation, rather than the companies who are the ones who introduce this cookie banner and "massive productivity loss". You know the best way of not having to put up coo…

> Shame companies cannot live without tracking cookies

Most cookies are entirely benign. Many cookies (or something like a cookie) are required for a website to operate normally. The EU law, while good intentioned, was/is too broad and failed to understand the realities of operating websites. This regulation has caused the entire world to be annoyed with useless cookie banners that 99% of people just reflexively click through - just like all of California's Prop65 warnings are ignored today.

> Don't store PII.

These hard-line statements defy reality. Many websites have legitimate need to store PII.

> You know the best way of not having to care about GDPR?

Don't be in the EU?

Just ignore it. There are no consequences. If you don't have physical presence within the EU - there's little-to-zero the EU can do about it. The EU can think it's laws apply to the world all it wants - but the world disagrees.

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

#33

Post by kalaksi »

patrick0d wrote: post #21

they could have made the law: >if you collect users data >you must ask first >add a yes or no button on a banner so they can pick but instead the eu citizens were let down by the legislators

Uhh, what do you think the law is?

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

#34

Post by gjsman-1000 »

diggan wrote: post #31
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Except it's not that black and white. If you follow the regulation too loosely, you get warnings. If you then ignore the problem, you'd get bigger problems. But no one is gonna put a "10% of global turnover" as a fine immediately.

> But no one is gonna put a "10% of global turnover" as a fine immediately.

You're dealing with the EU. Stupidly high fines happen weekly.

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

#35

Post by whstl »

patrick0d wrote: post #21

they could have made the law: >if you collect users data >you must ask first >add a yes or no button on a banner so they can pick but instead the eu citizens were let down by the legislators

This is indeed how it should be, and courts have consistently found enforced this.

French law for example specifically says that any implementation must "allow the user to refuse the deposit of cookies as easily as to accept it." [1]

[1] https://www.termsfeed.com/blog/cookie-consent-decline-reject...

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

#36

Post by al_borland »

coldpie wrote: post #6

Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banner filters. Fixed. Enable the Annoyances filters too, while you're in there. If you're on iOS, the Kill Sticky bookmarklet does a decent job of cleaning these up without breaking most sites: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...

I use Hush on iOS.

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

#37

Post by ravenstine »

tonymet wrote: post #14
coldpie wrote: post #6

Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banner filters. Fixed. Enable the Annoyances filters too, while you're in there. If you're on iOS, the Kill Sticky bookmarklet does a decent job of cleaning these up without breaking most sites: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...

content-based adblocking requires tremendous resources, and no longer works in Chrome, which is the primary browser.

Those resources are well spent.

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

#38

Post by diggan »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #26
diggan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this was a predictable response to a stupid rule It was predictable that ultimately people would blame the regulation instead of the companies? Not sure I understand what you mean, and even if you meant what I think you meant, not sure what the point is? People blame all sorts of things all the time... Edit since you've added more to your comment > Proving compliance with GDPR is tedious That's my point. No need to…

> predictable that ultimately people would blame the regulation instead of the companies It was predictable this would result in disclosure/consent spam. > No need to prove compliance if GDPR doesn't apply If you are in the EU, GDPR applies. It may not be relevant. But you’re subject to it and its regulatory arms. (And if you have a competitor in the EU, it’s known practice you can waste time and money with requests…

> If you are in the EU, GDPR applies. It may not be relevant. But you’re subject to it and its regulatory arms.

I think you might be missing that I'm talking about this from the companies perspective, not from the perspective of a person inside EU.

If the company doesn't store any "personal data", GDPR has nothing to do with it. It's strictly about "personal data" as defined here: https://gdpr.eu/article-4-definitions/

> (And if you have a competitor in the EU, it’s known practice you can waste time and money with requests and complaints.)

Happen to have any quotes/sources for this? Would be the first time I've come across it myself. I'm genuinely interested in if it's being misused like that.

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

#39

Post by r3trohack3r »

diggan wrote: post #5

Correct URL: https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-... > This situation calls for an urgent revision of the ePrivacy Directive Shame companies cannot live without tracking cookies, and shame that the blame somehow end up on the regulation, rather than the companies who are the ones who introduce this cookie banner and "massive productivity loss". You know the best way of not having to put up coo…

> 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 things I think that follow from that, things I haven't bothered to look into or implement. Like whatever policies, disclaimers, notifications, request handling processes, etc. that need to be in place to gather those logs.

Whether or not I need a registered agent in the EU to host my website seems to be rather fuzzy too. It seems to come down to how "sensitive" the data I store in my logs are?

Its also not clear to me whether my home router is subject to GDPR if it receives and logs a packet that was sent to it by an EU citizen, regardless of whether there was a public internet service hosted on that router or not.

I mostly choose to not think about these things - but that nagging concern that my entire self-hosted digital presence violates European law does linger.

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

#40

Post by JumpCrisscross »

frereubu wrote: post #27

"All" the EU needs to do is to mandate adherence to the Do Not Track setting in browsers, but then vast swathes of businesses based on unwanted and unethical tracking would go bust, so we have this really shitty stalemate. All websites we build adhere to the Do Not Track setting and don't even show a cookie banner if it's set. The only question is whether we should show a message to say that we're not tracking people…

> but then vast swathes of businesses based on unwanted and unethical tracking would go bust, so we have this really shitty stalemate

They’d be supplanted by foreign competitors. That’s the actual stalemate.

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