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Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

amazingcto.com

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

#471

Post by ryandrake »

jasode wrote: post #70

>, 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…

There are a lot of ridiculous things a company can choose to do in response to any given law. Those choices are not mandated by the law. Horrible consent UX is not the only option to choose from.

Government can, and should, analyze likely (or unlikely) unintended consequences and use those to further shape the law, but at the end of the day, those consequences come from choices that people who are subject to the law make.

I think the big mistake the EU made is they probably thought: “Surely no company would choose to abuse their customers with horrible UI just because they don’t like the law and want to take their collective frustration out on their users!” The EU was obviously wrong about the extent to which companies would throw their users under the bus while maliciously complying.

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

#472

Post by raydev »

shafyy wrote: post #224
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #51

Hate this way of thinking where the government (with seemingly good intentions) tries to stop something but leaves a loophole where all our lives are made more tedious and then people defend it saying the companies should just not do it, well we needed the law in the first place so it's a bit silly thinking to suggest they stop doing it after the law, no?. If the cookie law was written properly then it would have jus…

> If the cookie law was written properly then it would have just been a browser setting that had to be respected and this whole thing would have been completely transparent to the end user and they would have benefitted by default. The law does not mandate websites to display a cookie banner. There are already "Do not track" settings in browsers. A website could choose to honor that setting and don't track you withou…

But the websites are still putting up banners in my way, and they never remember what I consent to anyway, they just ask every time.

They didn't do this before the regulation. It doesn't much matter whether a website could do better, they simply aren't going to do better unless forced to.

> A website could choose to honor that setting and don't track you without ever showing you a cookie banner. But most don't.

Exactly! Either fix the regulation to say they can't make UX worse or throw it away.

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

#473

Post by danaris »

rglullis wrote: post #445
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…

> The law is updated to say you are not allowed to charge the user a fee unless you tell him in advance. Why not a real regulation then to get rid of hidden fees and heavy fines/jail time for companies that are found to be doing it? PG's argument (I hope) is that there is no point in talking about "regulation" and "customer protection" if companies STILL get away with their ridiculous and hostile practices. There is…

I mean, that would be great, but I suspect that even just here on HN you'd get a lot of people strongly disagreeing with you. Because that would infringe upon the companies' "freedom" to profit in whatever way they see fit—and the people's "freedom" to let their data be vacuumed up and sold for massive profits.

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

#474

Post by andrewaylett »

dangus wrote: post #92

Just in case this helps someone: you can just block cookie banners because before you click “accept” the default is no tracking. There are extensions like “I don’t care about cookies” for this but also uBlock Origin has a list checkbox for it.

The default should be no tracking.

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

#475

Post by adamlett »

_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

That's not entirely true. Continental European law tends to be far more detailed than Anglo Saxon law, but still relies on precedents set in previous cases when there are ambiguities in the law, and when it comes to metering out punishment and damages.

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

#476

Post by danaris »

caskstrength wrote: post #375
denton-scratch wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It's not the cookies that people object to, it's the tracking. Tracking provides no benefits to visitors Sure it does. Visitors get to use all those great sites and apps without paying for the services directly.

That's not a benefit of the tracking. That's a benefit of the advertising dollars.

I have yet to see any kind of meaningful study showing that tracking improves the ROI on advertising by anything remotely resembling enough to justify it.

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

#477

Post by raydev »

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.

> How much corporate propaganda are people consuming that legislators are seen as wholly responsible for the bad behavior and malicious compliance actions of corporations

Why do I need to be "consuming corporate propaganda" when I just hate that I need to dismiss banners on every news website, when I didn't have to before the regulation?

I don't care about being tracked. But now that all websites need to cover their asses in response to regulation, I'm forced to figure out which button I need to click on to read content, and these websites don't even appear to save my preferences whether I agree to be tracked or not.

Objectively, the outcome of this regulation is that my experience is worse. Are the companies bad actors? Sure! Sounds like the EU should account for companies' bad behavior instead of forcing the internet to be more annoying.

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

#478

Post by account42 »

maccard wrote: post #250
gizmo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Sounds like your US legal team is covering their asses on topics they are not familiar with instead of acquiring the neccessary competences.

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

#479

Post by account42 »

rcxdude wrote: post #409
gizmo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or because of FUD from people interested in undermining privacy protections.

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

#480

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

foobarian wrote: post #292
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…

The fees example is maybe apples to oranges. The fees are a problem because they subvert the pricing information signals needed for the free market. The problem is not the fact that they are charged, the problem is that they are not included in an upfront price display. Were they included in the total upfront price and never specified the users should not care - it's not their business how a company spends their mone…

The use of secret tracking also subverts the pricing signals needed for the free market. Users aren't informed that the website is subsidized by the sale of the users' information, much less the details of the arrangements and monetary amounts.

If the total price of the website without the secret costs of tracking were presented upfront, it would be less of an issue.

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