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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

#461

Post by fauigerzigerk »

n4r9 wrote: post #428
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would regard it as a duty of government to ensure that using the internet is safe and respects user privacy, but not to ensure that the internet has a clean UI. To that extent, I'd argue that the EU is achieving good outcomes. Ensuring a clean UI and smooth user experience is one of those things that should manifest as a result of market economics, but does not manifest because markets don't really work that way.

I see absolutely no reason why clean UX should manifest as a result of market forces. Media consumers, on average, are clearly unwilling to pay for ad-free experiences.

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

#462

Post by threemux »

_v7gu wrote: post #297
threemux wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, politicians don't spend much if any time thinking about second and third order consequences. GDPR is but one example, but instances of this abound. The default should be to mistrust new laws. Reagan takes lots of flak on the internet, but he was right on the scariest phrase being "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help". Even worse, this thread is full of armchair lawyers that will confid…

Cases != law in continental Europe. The law is the law. I don't think you're in a position to call others armchair lawyers

The wording was imprecise, but to the website owner, this is a distinction without a difference. Just because a civil law system is in use versus common law, you still need judges to interpret what the law is. Their decisions may not be binding in the way precedent is in common law systems, but they are still important in determining what might be legal or illegal in the face of ambiguous laws (that is, all laws)

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

#463

Post by qarl »

maccard wrote: post #447
qarl wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your legal team is holding the door open for the day they decide to start tracking. They probably won't tell you that, tho.

Our legal team is following the checklist that they have that they know is pre-approved

OK? Does that contradict what I said?

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

#464

Post by itishappy »

paulgb wrote: post #137
xxs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the confusion is about advertising and tracking - the banners are about tracking not advertising.

Advertising can be more targeted (and thus higher paying) when paired with tracking.

So can car insurance, but I'd rather my agent not install a GPS without my knowledge or consent on my vehicle.

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

#465

Post by [deleted] »

cseleborg wrote: post #380
skrebbel wrote: post #150

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…

> 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. Thank you. The industry needs more such testimonies showing that letting go of tracking is okay and won't sink the ship.

[deleted]

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

#466

Post by Cthulhu_ »

CipherThrowaway wrote: post #188
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…

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.

Apple is doing the same thing, passive-aggressively doing things like removing support for pinning webapps / PWAs / whatever they're called to your home screen, then backtracking after backlash. Or Microsoft with their browser choice screen or Windows releases without media player. And even those aren't as bad as the malicious compliance of cookie banners.

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

#467

Post by account42 »

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…

The GDRP is about all kinds of tracking, of which things you can block locally at the browser level is only one part. So yes, even those users that already cared enough to block/discard cookies benefit.

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

#468

Post by Cthulhu_ »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #293
CipherThrowaway wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was your choice in the end, but this was the problem - people didn't have the choice, or the awareness. The EU law fixed this, but instead of corporations going "Hmm, maybe we shouldn't track users", they instead went with malicious compliance and implemented annoyances - because data is more valuable for a lot of websites than whatever said website is peddling.

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

#469

Post by Cthulhu_ »

alistairSH wrote: post #374
throwawaysleep wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A site can serve ads without tracking (and the banner) - the ads just couldn't be targeted at individuals. Instead they'd have to guess what ad was appropriate ("Rolling Stone" could serve everybody ads for Taylor Swift's latest album without a banner, etc).

> ("Rolling Stone" could serve everybody ads for Taylor Swift's latest album without a banner, etc).

And that would be fine, as long as Swift was willing to pay for it. But the tracking and personalized ads thing was a numbers game; personalized ads have a higher conversion rate, thus are more valuable, thus we need data to personalize ads.

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

#470

Post by account42 »

username332211 wrote: post #322
CipherThrowaway wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> the German state railways

No such thing anymore, unfortunately.

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