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Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

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Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#401

Post by tremon »

pokot0 wrote: post #355
denton-scratch wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what a nightmare internet is in Europe I live in Europe; I don't experience this "nightmare". Would you care to expand?

Sure. The nightmare is that every single time you open the browser on a website you have to go through the data tracking preference for that website. It's a lot of work to avoid being tracked (companies are obviously using dark patterns there) and when you do it 20 times a day it gets frustrating quickly and collectively a big waste of human time. Now I am not saying the US doesn't have a problem. They just don't hav…

I think your problem is that you're accessing US websites from Europe, since those are what you know. European websites are a lot less annoying, they actually care about the customer base here.

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#402

Post by lynx23 »

HelloNurse wrote: post #397
lynx23 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it only were that simple. When the GDPR came out, a lot of confusion and misunderstanding ensued. Not only regarding the damn cookie banner. Even totally legitimate health-care providers started to collect signatures to be on the safe side. I still rememeber receiving a basic GDPR training where we were told that opt-out/signing is only necessary if the entity is planning to do weird stuff with your data. IOW, if…

Incompetent lawyers and managers did a half-assed job, and some exemplary fines will motivate them with respect to the other half.

That is so wonderfully naiv that I had to laugh out loud. The fairytale of the manager who suddenly is fined big-time for his/her decisions is just that, a fairytale to pacify critics.

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#403

Post by maccard »

raverbashing wrote: post #283
maccard wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for this, it seems a lot of cookie popups are there just due to cargo culting

I don't quite think Cargo Culting is the right label for it. It's not just because everyone's doing it. My experience when legal meets code is that common sense, intent and what is actually allowed go out the window, and cover-your-ass wins. My experience with Legal has been that they default to no "just in case" for every question you come to them with.

It's a battle to get them onboard to not taking the safest possible approach, so you only want to fight that battle when it's a kingmaker of an opportunity.

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#404

Post by tremon »

rnts08 wrote: post #173
isodev wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Number of visitors" does not constitute tracking. The tracking in question here is to discover who you are specifically and the absurd amount of detail about your online activities collected and shared with data brokers for aggregation and resale. A few of these cookie prompts during the day and they'd be able to tell everything from where your kids go to school to the kind of prn you prefer to watch on weekdays and…

I used to work at an online video advertisement company, you'd be horrified how much information we tracked across all the ads, especially since the ad was played with a special media player "plugin" loaded inside the other media player. This is how ad companies can sell premium views, don't show cosmetics to men, increase car related ads to people who has watched other car related ads and so on. There's no such thin…

> This is how ad companies can sell premium views, don't show cosmetics to men, increase car related ads to people who has watched other car related ads and so on.

It's really not. They already could do all that before cyberstalking was normalized. It's called content-based profiling, and it doesn't require any GDPR consent.

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#405

Post by ZiiS »

niklasrde wrote: post #201
ZiiS wrote: post #100

Whilst, I am very opposed to tracking; especially covert. I do believe the cookie law is bad. Fundamentally, websites can not store content on your computer without your consent. Your "User Agent" is what stores cookies; it is usually a piece of open source software fully in your control capable of only storing them based on any policy you like, including asking you for each site. Whilst it would be nice for all site…

That's not true. "strictly necessary cookies" are allowed without consent (but information on their use must be available). Examples for what that means given by the EU itself [1] include "cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping". And on the policing - there are a lot of laws that cannot be "policed". It requires trust, goodwill, collaboration and savy users to report viola…

How do you know if a site has used a cookie they said was functional to track you?

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#406

Post by fauigerzigerk »

ragnese wrote: post #345
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it does not work both ways. The roles of governments and corporations are not symmetric. Good regulation is regulation that has good outcomes. If a law has bad outcomes it is a bad law. You can separately complain about what companies are doing but that doesn't change the fact that it's a bad law. It is of course debatable whether GDPR as a whole has bad outcomes, but if we're talking about cookie banners in isol…

> No, it does not work both ways. The roles of governments and corporations are not symmetric. > > Good regulation is regulation that has good outcomes. [...] You don't seem to explain what the role of corporations is or what a good corporation looks like. If these things are not symmetric, you need to finish your explanation of why or how they aren't. Corporations and the whole of property rights only exist because…

Governments are supposed to represent the whole of society. The justification for their policies is ideally based on democratic legitimacy. No entity outside of government can possibly have that legitimacy.

In my opinion it is not audacious at all to reject the idea that corporations should intentionally pursue societal goals or claim to act out of a sense of duty.

Of course we want the effect of what corporations do to be of net benefit to society as a whole. But this cannot be based on their intentions or sense of duty. It has to be based on the systemic effects of them pursuing their own (possibly enlightened) self interest within the framework of the law.

It is for governments to make sure that these effects are beneficial and to intervene when they are not. So the asymmetry I see is that capitalism is a tool of society, not the other way around.

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#407

Post by c22 »

nolok wrote: post #17

Imagine 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…

Except you could always just "turn off fees" in the browser, so the whole conflict seems kind of superfluous.

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#408

Post by ragnese »

kortilla wrote: post #350
ragnese wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so depressing. Many of the people who are pointing the finger at the regulators for the annoying cookie banners don't actually see the web site/app *as* a bad actor. The fact that they had been tracking tons of extra data via cookies without their consent or knowledge was totally fine to them as long as it wasn't inconveniencing them in any way. The cookie banner is an inconvenience to their mindless consumption…

> The cookie banner is an inconvenience to their mindless consumption, It’s an inconvenience to people who care about privacy and use browser configurations that don’t store state between visits. So now in an attempt to protect regular users, the law ended up hurting users that already cared. Additionally, the shadiest and incompetent sites still just track people with no cookie banner. So the law doesn’t really prov…

> It’s an inconvenience to people who care about privacy and use browser configurations that don’t store state between visits. > > So now in an attempt to protect regular users, the law ended up hurting users that already cared.

Fair point about the banners mostly "hurting" users who care about privacy (but, really though- how much does it really "hurt" you? I'm "hurt" more by the fact that I have to fold laundry several days a week).

But, I take major issue with you saying that the LAW ended up hurting users. Companies are under no legal obligation to make those banners as obnoxious as they are or with so many dark patterns (I sometimes don't know if I'm even enabling or disabling tracking with the way they word it). That's squarely on the web site owners pulling that nonsense.

> Additionally, the shadiest and incompetent sites still just track people with no cookie banner. So the law doesn’t really provide protection against uncooperative parties, whereas privacy technology does.

I agree that the only/best way to protect yourself is via technology and not by relying on people obeying the law.

However, if this is also an argument against having the law, it's an incredibly weak one. You can apply that logic to argue that NO laws are effective. People still murder even though it's illegal- must be a bad law, no?

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#409

Post by rcxdude »

gizmo wrote: post #127
aurareturn wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have /any/ examples of websites that don't have a bunch of 3rd party cookies that still have a cookie banner? Middle managers absolutely love anything with charts and graphs because it makes their decisions feel more scientific. That's why they want tracking software included on their websites. And if the law requires disclosure then a cookie popup is the solution.

I think a heck of a lot of smaller sites just cargo-cult the pop-up. Either because they misunderstand the law or because of overly cautious lawyers.

Re: Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

#410

Post by tmaly »

I don’t put these cookie banners on my sites. They are just annoying.

Most decent browsers block google analytics these days.

The facebook pixel was retired as far as I can recall.

At this point I just have a local analytics setup just to let me know how many visits a particular page got.

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