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

371–380 of 433 posts

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

#371

Post by native_samples »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #359
native_samples wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, nothing about GDPR itself is clear and understandable, as is evidenced by the fact that everyone keeps discovering years after implementation that some random country disagrees on their interpretation of it.

The only people who misunderstand GDPR are people whose salaries depend on misunderstanding GDPR. The requirements are quite clear, advertiser just don't like them and are trying to avoid complying with them.

Yeah? So nobody in the EU is using Google Fonts, AWS, GCP, Azure, CloudFlare, Akamai or any other US provider then, given that this ruling is based on the fact that loading the consent settings screen from the shared domain requires "sharing" an IP address? Nobody in the EU runs an online business reliant on advertising? Of course they are.

I'm convinced pro-GDPR views are always ideological in nature. It's impossible to read GDPR or related case law from the perspective of trying to comply with it and not be disgusted. Every single requirement is vague and subjective - words like "appropriate", "necessary", "reasonable", "proportionate" etc aren't just a part of this law, they are the entire essence of it. And even the occasional term that looks precise often has totally unintuitive definitions, like the way they define large random numbers as "personally identifiable" even though there's no database that links these numbers to any actual personal identity.

Even this announcement about a new ruling is a fog of confusion. Why is asking users for consent, a key piece of GDPR compliance previously, suddenly not OK? Why is this being phrased as "freeing users from consent spam"?

This sort of thing wrecks the EU in the eyes of people actually building things. It makes it seem that this is a part of the world without rule of law of any kind. You can invest hundreds of millions into GDPR compliance and years later discover it was all in vain, without any warning whatsoever. You're being constantly trolled in courts by random academics and "civil liberties" organizations who don't seem to care about actual civil liberties issues like mandatory medical interventions but who define advertising cookies as a grave threat. Dealing with the EU gets ever more painful and if this keeps up, people there are gonna discover they're being denied services or simply charged more as a "GDPR litigation premium". And then they'll be stuck, because the home grown EU software industry is stillborn.

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

#372

Post by goodpoint »

quocanh wrote: post #290
riddleronroof wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but I don’t get how this consent system ran for years? How can one get pre approved? The issue here isn’t that they collected data (it’s own problems), but they they didn’t use the right language! Does this mean it will be a long term of conditions like apple does every time we use a website? ICCL might have made internet worse with this. Not better.

GDPR enforcement is completely arbitrary (in both senses of the word). People might cheer for the downfall of the tech giants but it's really just a way for the EU to control US companies, extending their power beyond their jurisdiction.

> extending their power beyond their jurisdiction

US companies inject all sort of trackers and spyware into browsers of EU citizens and you talk about jurisdiction?

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

#373

Post by goodpoint »

endisneigh wrote: post #179
ncallaway wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose there are two products on the market. One, a children’s toy that sells for $9.99. The other a very similar children’s toy that uses lead paint, instead of a safer paint, but is otherwise very similar. It is not clearly labeled as having lead paint. The lead paint toy sells for $4.99. If people buy the cheaper toy, does that mean people are “choosing” lead paint over the more expensive toy? No! It means people…

You're comparing seeing ads with children consuming lead paint? Lead paint has very obvious, bodily harm to children. Do ads harm children? Perhaps, but even if they did, there's no cost to visit a free-site without ads, or pay for a site without ads.

> You're comparing seeing ads with children consuming lead paint?

No, nobody said it's the same thing. It is an example of misleading business practices.

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

#374

Post by jdrc »

phicoh wrote: post #370
jdrc wrote: post #155

Good, but i 'd like to see someone going after the root perpetrators of this racket, the advertisers themselves. That industry is surprisingly immune from scrutiny despite the fact that they 've wholesale sold their soul to google which is now both the buyer and seller of billions of advertiser money. They re just enabling the monopoly

Advertisers need content to advertise on. The GDPR basically forces content providers to get rid of tracking. That will require Google to provide an ad platform without tracking. And then the fun is over for the advertisers. Of course with underfunded government privacy enforcement bodies, that process takes a long time. And then there is Ireland.

No, advertisers want attention. And they are lazy, they are not going to look for content that fits their product. Google tells them "i have X users interested in your product" and that's what they buy. What's going to happen is they will move all their ad inventory into google search advertising.

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

#375

Post by [deleted] »

phicoh wrote: post #370
jdrc wrote: post #155

Good, but i 'd like to see someone going after the root perpetrators of this racket, the advertisers themselves. That industry is surprisingly immune from scrutiny despite the fact that they 've wholesale sold their soul to google which is now both the buyer and seller of billions of advertiser money. They re just enabling the monopoly

Advertisers need content to advertise on. The GDPR basically forces content providers to get rid of tracking. That will require Google to provide an ad platform without tracking. And then the fun is over for the advertisers. Of course with underfunded government privacy enforcement bodies, that process takes a long time. And then there is Ireland.

[deleted]

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

#376

Post by salawat »

chefandy wrote: post #75

We designers must reasonably but seriously convey the user-hostility of these patterns to higher-ups at every available opportunity. Sure, you'll get overruled by the dollar-focused Jr. Marketing Exec. On the other hand, the folks who say things like "Refuse! It's a designers job to say no!" probably have much bigger savings accounts than I and most others do... but not saying anything implies consent, and that's whe…

>but not saying anything implies consent...

Hey, lets have sex.

WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT

You seem to have gotten confused as to the fundamental nature of consent.

See the problem is it isn't put in writing. Putting things in writing gets people to pay attention.

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

#377

Post by eproxus »

jacquesm wrote: post #317

So, how long until at least one online media giant realizes that not tracking their users and good old display ads are the easy way out?

Never, as long as their core business model is based on privacy invasive tracking? They have every incentive to fight this back and none to actually comply (unless fines start getting higher, I suppose).

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

#378

Post by phicoh »

jdrc wrote: post #374
phicoh wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertisers need content to advertise on. The GDPR basically forces content providers to get rid of tracking. That will require Google to provide an ad platform without tracking. And then the fun is over for the advertisers. Of course with underfunded government privacy enforcement bodies, that process takes a long time. And then there is Ireland.

No, advertisers want attention. And they are lazy, they are not going to look for content that fits their product. Google tells them "i have X users interested in your product" and that's what they buy. What's going to happen is they will move all their ad inventory into google search advertising.

Google will still tell them 'I have X users interested in your product'. It is just that Google will compute that from the contents of the wedsite instead of from tracking users.

It would be amazing if there would be no ads outside google search. But that will not happen. That is a void that will be filled very quickly.

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

#379

Post by mpweiher »

NullPrefix wrote: post #323
mpweiher wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never, as far as I could tell. That was the whole point of the "reject all" button: to trick you into implicitly "agreeing" to the "legitimate interest" section.

"reject all", then go to "legitimate interest" and click "object all". Or, you know, just disable JS.

Except "reject all" closes the popup. Gotcha!

So you have to first got to "legitimate interest", uncheck all the individual "purposes", because usually there is no "object all". Once you've done that (with "object all" if you're lucky), you then have to go to individual vendors, because objecting to all the purposes does not cover all the vendors. Yeah. Again, if you're lucky there's an "object all", but usually there isn't. So gotta uncheck all those. There's lots. And often there isn't even a good scrollbar indicator to show how far you've gotten. If there is it's just depressing.

Then you can hit "Reject All". And it's not entirely clear if "Reject All" doesn't turn the LIs back on, because, once again, that dismisses the dialog.

Post reply on HN