381–390 of 457 posts
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Most studies pretty clearly show that harsher punishments are not an effective deterrent.
That may be, but a threat of jail hanging over a director or CEO may make them take the correct course of action - effectively becoming the deterrent.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/crime-and-punishment...
Fundamentally, the browser is the user's agent. Storing cookies, running tracking scripts, etc. should be controlled by the browser. Some browsers may take a strict "block everything" approach, some may be relaxed, and some may harass the user with prompts. Users are free to choose the appropriate browser. Depending on websites to limit tracking by on their own is very difficult, since it is inherently against many w…
Browsers do provide these controls to users. You don't have to switch between them. More fine grained customization is possible with extensions, assuming you can trust extensions authors and the browser you're using supports them.
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I agree that it would massively help, but I don't think it would solve the entire problem. A lot of my interests online were cultivated as a kid where even a 10 cent charge would've made me click away. I'm sure it wouldn't have been an issue in highly developed countries, but it would've been a limiting factor for me.
So the model that works best for micropayments in most cases is exponentially decreasing prices over time. When the content is new it costs $1, in two months it costs $.50, in two months more it costs $.25, and so on down to zero, at which point it becomes free proof of the quality of your work to get people to pay for the newer stuff. You can actually make more money using a pricing model like that, because you get…
A lot of what we have online just isn't viable on pricing models like this. The main divide you'll see is likely by country due to wealth differences.
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That metaphor falls apart on multiple levels. Paying for a meal is a transaction that both parties explicitly agree to. Tracking in its current state is mostly done without the consumers awareness/consent. Tracking is also not required for advertising, it only (supposedly) increases the effectiveness of it at the expense of the user. A more apt metaphor would be "restaurants are using cheap toxic chemicals to increas…
I agree with you on the non-transactional nature of advertisement, as far as viewers are concerned, the metaphor is perhaps only effect at illustrating how given the choice most people would prefer to have free stuff at the cost of everything else (e.g. free meals or free content and services). Tracking is not strictly necessary for having ads, but for having _effective_ ads I would argue at least in some cases it ma…
Perhaps tracking users is more effective, perhaps it is not. Regardless, boundaries need to be set to enforce ethical behaviour if the unethical behavior is more profitable. If that means certain companies or business models won't survive: so be it. There is always a trade-off to be made between ethics and business. After all, the exact same arguments could be made against outlawing child labor or any of the past atrocities businesses committed in the name of profit. Businesses that cannot survive ethically will die to make room for businesses that can.
During the initial stages we had worried that consent rates would be low, and while Germany was "low" at around 70-75%, we found that overall consent rates across all countries were 90%+ with exceptions for Germany, France, and a couple other European countries. This was consistent across both the application and our marketing website, and across 10s of 1000s of users.
So while I don't doubt that the author ran an experiment and got these results, I strongly disagree that you will get "only 9%". Specifically, these lines in the blog post:
> And if you give them an easy way to ignore your banner or to say no to be tracked, most of them will simply do that.
> Most web users will simply select “no to tracking” once in their browser and the browser will block all the trackers for them as they surf the web.
is not correct, at least from my experience, and it absolutely can't be used as a blanket statement like this. Of course my anecdote is, well, anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but I don't think it's fair to say that users will simply reject it no matter what, and it really depends on both context and trust levels.
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Jail time is probably the only suitable enough deterrent for adtech nightmares. Fines are just treated as a cost of doing business expense, and doesn't directly even hurt the terrible people making these decisions. When someone commits a wrong, the punishment is in part based on the amount of harm. You might feel that adtech causes small harms, if you look at harm against an individual, but adtech folks harm billions…
Most studies pretty clearly show that harsher punishments are not an effective deterrent.
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> For many services there is simply no (online, i.e. practically relevant) alternative, because none of the market players have an incentive to be privacy preserving (think major news outlets) or because the service is not interchangable due to network effects (facebook, twitter etc). But here's the big question: would these services have even existed in the first place if these laws had been in place? The internet h…
That's a weird argument to make. Maybe the businesses ("services") would have not existed with these laws in existence already. The question is would the world be a better place without them. I don't think the answer to that question is so straight forward. We as society implement laws to prevent undesirable behaviour all the time. You can certainly argue that the law against robbing banks for example has prevented b…
I think the internet providing so much information for free is what made it so amazing. I understand that it's not really free, but it's at no monetary cost to the user. The moment you slap a monetary cost on it you create a disincentive for the user to engage with the service.
I do understand though that nothing is free. We are probably going to pay a large price as a society for it.
What really drives me crazy are prompts that start by showing two options: "Consent to all cookies", or "customize". If you click "customize", it opens a new modal window with a loading indicator that just doesn't seem to finish. I literally waited 60 seconds and then tried again by refreshing the page, ending up with another infinite loading indicator. This means that users are de-factor forced to click "consent to…
I know exactly which prompt you’re talking about, it’s very common around the web. Unfortunately, the only solution I found that fixes it is disabling ad and tracker blockers. They seem to break that prompt, though if you set them to be very aggressive, the prompt disappears altogether.
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> I wonder what results you would see for something like yahoo, the daily mail, reddit, or other sites that heavily rely on ad revenue, which attempt to force the user to accept the cookies through non-obvious no buttons, or long processes to opt out of cookies. I wonder what's the best of shaming/reporting these examples and if an effective way exists[1]. If you have any ideas, sources, anything—please share. GDPR c…
It's not clear to me that the dark UX forms are legal.