321–330 of 395 posts
If you got told tomorrow you had to start every conversation with "are you okay if I remember this" or you lose 90% of your salary, guess what you'd do.
Why should websites even be trusted with implementing these banners in the first place? Browser vendors should be responsible for implementing these controls per-origin. Give a little banner pop-up built into Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and the rest. Have it display every time a new site sets a cookie for the first time. Or have it reject every cookie by default, unless I whitelist a site. This would result in a consist…
The law isn't about cookies - it's about obtaining consent to process personal data. You need to ask permission to track people and to do other things with their personal data. Cookies are one method to do that, but any other method (like local storage or storing session state in a URL parameter) also counts. Hence, it is not possible to have a system where a browser can tell a site what kinds of processing the user…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You The Point No "cookie banner" is required UNLESS you are using cookies to track me or personally idetify me.... in which case, you must ask my explicit consent to do so. Blame the parasitic adtech industry wanting trade your personal data. Not the EU for providing you with consumer protection.
> Blame the parasitic adtech industry wanting trade your personal data. Blame them for what? We all understand that personal information is the currency that pays for these services. While we may not love that we have to pay (who does?), we accept it as a fair trade. Until governments get their ass in gear to make paying with more favourable currencies viable, that is going to remain, now just with extra clicks. > No…
What are the services? Leave out sites where you pay for something with money, or banks, or subscription sites. Those often have tracking too, but they could exist without it. What services are the free ones providing?
News is a special case, paying for journalism is a problem. Other than that:
* Videos and images
* Forums and blogs
* Databases like IMDB
* Random bits of information you want once in your life
I'm struck by how the presence of any amount of website design makes all these things worse. It's not only too easy for them to get our data, it's too hard for us to get their data, because the presentation and theatrical impression of being a service is all self-aggrandizing and works to delay and capture users for more tracking and ads. All we really want is servers, not services.
If somehow storage and processing was paid for by magical pixies, and available as a utilitarian series of gray bulletin boards with identical design, that would be much better than all the bloated sites that track visitors. It's wrong to portray this as a bargain in which we respect and appreciate some sort of service, and therefore ought to pay for it, because there is no service. They're not being paid for providing something wonderful, they're being paid for having got there first and for being well-known, or promoting themselves.
The whole thing is a colossal waste too, it was a law written by people who don't understand tech for special interest groups who don't want to actually make things better. If you don't want a website doing something on your computer, you start with the browser, not the website.
> it was a law written by people who don't understand tech On the contrary; data protection law was written precisely by those who understand tech and the dangers of companies using it to gather and share your personal data. It's utterly bizarre people get annoyed for being asked explicit, opt-in consent to gather and share personal data on a case by case basis (as the law demands!), rather than get annoyed at the sc…
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.
I am kind of frustrated by the widespread misunderstandings in this thread. Laws are best when they are abstract, so that there is no need for frequent updates and they adapt to changing realities. The European "cookie law" does not mandate cookie banners, it mandates informed consent. Companies choose to implement that as a banner. There is no doubt that the goals set by the law are sensible. It is also not evident…
I am kind of frustrated by the widespread misunderstandings in this thread. Laws are best when they are abstract, so that there is no need for frequent updates and they adapt to changing realities. The European "cookie law" does not mandate cookie banners, it mandates informed consent. Companies choose to implement that as a banner. There is no doubt that the goals set by the law are sensible. It is also not evident…
Such basic functionality as cookies shouldn't need explicit consent. The consent is you navigated to the webpage, if you don't like it you can use a browser that doesn't set cookies.
Setting cookies that aren’t used to track people, doesn’t require consent.
The consent is for tracking that happens to use cookies, not for cookies themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
DNT does not provide informed consent. It may, if set to not track, imply denial, but the reverse is not true. If DNT is accepting or unset, the site needs to fall back to the banner to get consent. And at that point you may as well prompt everyone with the banner instead of complicating the codebase with extra logic for a DNT edge case.
I doubt there would be any concerns with "complicating the codebase" (really?) if there was a Yes-Track header that gave consent but no negative signal.
Granted, you can't legally use it like that where EU laws apply, per the GDPR. Hence the complaints about the GDPR you see in other comments.
I am kind of frustrated by the widespread misunderstandings in this thread. Laws are best when they are abstract, so that there is no need for frequent updates and they adapt to changing realities. The European "cookie law" does not mandate cookie banners, it mandates informed consent. Companies choose to implement that as a banner. There is no doubt that the goals set by the law are sensible. It is also not evident…
Such basic functionality as cookies shouldn't need explicit consent. The consent is you navigated to the webpage, if you don't like it you can use a browser that doesn't set cookies.
How do I even know that you want to try and farm my personal data until I go there?
Perhaps you should put a click through gateway that states that "proceeding on to this website will sell your personal information to spammy, scummy advertising".
I am kind of frustrated by the widespread misunderstandings in this thread. Laws are best when they are abstract, so that there is no need for frequent updates and they adapt to changing realities. The European "cookie law" does not mandate cookie banners, it mandates informed consent. Companies choose to implement that as a banner. There is no doubt that the goals set by the law are sensible. It is also not evident…
I partly agree but feel you’ve conflated a few things: - Laws are best when abstract. This is true. Laws work best when they cover a class of behavior, not specific behaviors. - Requiring informed consent is good. This I disagree with with because it is a hard to measure outcome. Abstract, yes, but to the point where nobody knows what it means. The only way to meet this in spirit is to go so far overboard that nobody…
The definition of consent is provided here. [0] There are clear application guidelines. To me it takes being intentionally obtuse or malicious in the interpretation when reading the text to come to the conclusion "I don't know what it means so I'll do the thing that benefits me".
Imagine blowing through a stop sign and trying to explain that you don't know what it means, the Earth is moving so you could never really be in compliance. You're not wrong but it's clear that your incompliance doesn't come from a place of honest misunderstanding.
> Mandating that huge populations spend time to make informed case by case decisions
It's mandating that the user is given the tools to provide informed consent, not that they must use them properly. If you need to know what it means, the text is clear. If not and never needed to read it, it's easy to conclude it's hard, impossible even.
[0] https://gdpr.eu/article-4-definitions/#:~:text=%E2%80%98-,co...