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Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
361–370 of 662 posts
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that you'd still get cookie banners even with option 1, because a site can always ask you if you're willing to override your default preference.
It could work like popup permissions - unobtrusive notification you ignore unless you're specifically looking for it.
It could. And the GDPR already bans dark UX patterns in consent popups (i.e. making it artificially difficult to refuse consent). But the law can’t realistically tell sites exactly how to design their UX.
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Almost all websites make money through ads The EU regulation does not prevent ads from being shown, it specifically targets tracking. No tracking > no banner > everyone is happier > go ahead and show all the ads that are required.
And all that tracking comes down with inability to take risk on business side. Ad company wants to be 100% sure that ads are shown to humans, and pay only for those shown to humans(going deeper - to specific cohorts of humans, which in the past was approximated by content of the site showing ads). Whereas sites serving ads want to extract as much money as it is possible from advertisers based on their audience count.…
Without regulation, how do you expect this market to change?
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#364Imagine 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…
Airbnb used to hide their total price until EU started requiring them to do so in 2019, whereas USA only had this requirement from December 2022.
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not only that, I'm not an EU citizen and I'm not browsing websites based in EU but I'm still bombarded with cookie banners non-stop. Again, that's the fault of the companies putting those up, they could make it opt-in to collect your data, they could just put a small notice on the footer with 2 simples links "Accept all/Reject all". But they chose, they decided to pester you with those banners as annoyingly as poss…
The fact that companies are doing that says more about the bad law than the companies which is exactly Paul Graham's point.
It is the companies that suck, and Paul Graham is (quite literally) invested in the suckage, wherefore this dumb tweet. Which, if one wanted to create an ad campaign for that eternal Upton Sinclair quote, couldn't have been done much better.
(Thanks for the site though, Paul)
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#366>, 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.
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Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case, it is just showing that most companies are collecting more data than they need. You don’t need a banner for the data that is necessary for the service to work at minimum level. There is no role for the consent since the site won’t work otherwise.
This is something a lot of people seem to misunderstand about GDPR. At its core it says you should only process people’s personal data within a lawful basis. There are 6, and consent is only one. (a) Consent: the individual has given clear consent for you to process their personal data for a specific purpose. (b) Contract: the processing is necessary for a contract you have with the individual, or because they have a…
This is true, but the comment you replied to was about the cookie law, not about GDPR. They are separate issues, even if they are obviously related. Cookie law is about not using other peoples storage for usage that is not needed, GDPR is about personal information. You can use cookies for saving information that is not personal but that still would need banners.
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
We already have granular permissions for other things (like location queries) and it works out just fine. You allow things when they make sense and refuse when they don't. It could be resolved in a way that preserves usability, but still achieves a goal not tracking non-users via ads. I doubt that it would make PG particularly happy though.
The key difference with tracking is that it's based on intent. Technically there is no difference between a tracking cookie and any other cookie. It is just a question of its intended use.
Sure. If I'm asking a website to remember my user session, I expect and am happy to allow a cookie, even if it's a few extra clicks. When I visit a site I'm not a registered user of, no tracking is needed really.
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#369Hate 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…
Exactly this. The law could have been written in such a way that we could use a browser setting and avoid incessent popups which irritate users and desensitise them to genuinely useful warnings. Whatever the good intentions of EU lawmakers, they seem inept at technical legislation because they ALLOW companies to continue doing shady things, and rather than tackle it, the legislators create a law that merely annoys us…
> Whatever the good intentions of EU lawmakers, they seem inept at technical legislation
I don't think that's a specialization of EU lawmakers, particularly. A far as I can recall, laemakers started thinking about internet regulation around the turn of the millenium, and I didn't welcome the prospect; I assumed that regulation would favour state intelligence and police agencies, and would be drafted by adtech lobbyists. Why? Because I didn't think the civil servants who are supposed to draft these laws had the requisite competence.
Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that companies are doing that says more about the bad law than the companies which is exactly Paul Graham's point.
It is the companies that suck, and Paul Graham is (quite literally) invested in the suckage, wherefore this dumb tweet. Which, if one wanted to create an ad campaign for that eternal Upton Sinclair quote, couldn't have been done much better. (Thanks for the site though, Paul)
Paul is very unlikely to be invested in tracking unless he has some shares in Google/Facebook. Startups in tracking aren’t really a thing