371–380 of 662 posts
>, 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.
That X button is right there at the top near the tab name. Not sure how a user could be forced against their will into staying on the site presenting them with a cookie banner.
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My company recently announced a game, and we launched a website for the game. There's no ̶t̶h̶i̶r̶d̶ ̶p̶a̶r̶t̶y̶ e:tracking cookies (I didn't make the site, but I do run it). Our US based legal team told us we needed a cookie banner if we were going to have visitors in the EU. I pushed back, but I lost, and ultimately it's not my fight.
It is not about third party or not, but what it is used for. Consent may be required even if there are no cookies at all.
you're right, I said third party, but I actually meant tracking. I actually went and checked, and our only cookie is the cookie for if you've seen the cookie banner or not...
> Consent may be required even if there are no cookies at all.
For what?
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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.
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(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 cons…
Sure it does. Visitors get to use all those great sites and apps without paying for the services directly.
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The funny thing is it's not just corporations. When you open the German state railways' website, somehow you get a GDPR overlay, When you open the German revenue agency's website, you get greeted by a cookie banner on top. I call upon all German users of this website to write to their MPs! Obviously the German civil service is a bad actor! The German deep state is plotting to discredit our beloved eurocrats and must…
> I call upon all German users of this website to write to their legislators! Obviously the German civil service is a bad actor! The German deep state must be shut down! I understand the joke you're trying to make but you clearly don't understand the relation between germans and privacy/tracking regulation to think this makes sense.
And I only picked Germany, because it's one of the few EU countries where stuff like that is rigorously enforced. In the rest of the EU, everything unrelated to the common market and/or getting money from the EU is at best haphazardly enforced.
If you want to, check out france.fr, a website maintained by an agency of the French tourism ministry. (After disabling the 3 dozens of annoyance blocking extensions everyone must use nowadays, of course.) What do you see?
A giant cookie overlay. Égoutter le marais!
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Using your analogy, I think what ends up happening is that even companies that don't collect hidden fees will put up a banner just in case. 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.
Just been in Europe last week (I live in US): you have no idea what a nightmare internet is in Europe. You are only seeing a side effect here.
Source: Living in Europe
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Fun fact, they are illegal if they require more clicks to reject than accept; so this is not a consequence of the law anyway.
I wouldn't call it fun that so many big providers just ignore the law and are apparently getting through without consequences.
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Your point is well made, and this is an unfortunate consequence of the regulation (and I enjoyed the analogy). But it isn't necessary to have cookie banners on every website. Github is a moderately complex, user-optimised website, right? https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/
I clicked on that link and immediately got a cookie banner. Am I missing something?
I agree with this. We recently removed all tracking (eg google analytics) from our homepage because we didn't want to have a cookie banner. The result: everything is going fine. Turns out we didn't need the tracking at all. Should've done it way sooner. I hope the EU sticks to their guns. A few years ago, there was a flood of HN posts about optimizing initial page loads etc, because research showed that even a few hu…
Thank you. The industry needs more such testimonies showing that letting go of tracking is okay and won't sink the ship.