Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

legiscope.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 395 posts

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#51

Post by diggan »

Alupis wrote: post #32
diggan wrote: post #5

Correct URL: https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-... > This situation calls for an urgent revision of the ePrivacy Directive Shame companies cannot live without tracking cookies, and shame that the blame somehow end up on the regulation, rather than the companies who are the ones who introduce this cookie banner and "massive productivity loss". You know the best way of not having to put up coo…

> Shame companies cannot live without tracking cookies Most cookies are entirely benign. Many cookies (or something like a cookie) are required for a website to operate normally. The EU law, while good intentioned, was/is too broad and failed to understand the realities of operating websites. This regulation has caused the entire world to be annoyed with useless cookie banners that 99% of people just reflexively clic…

> Most cookies are entirely benign. Many cookies (or something like a cookie) are required for a website to operate normally. The EU law was/is too broad - and has caused the entire world to be annoyed with useless cookie banners.

Give reading the actual implementations a try. You'll quickly notice they actually thought of this. I wouldn't say it's "expertly crafted" by any means, but the banner is for a specific "class" of cookies, not just "abc=123" as you seem to think.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#52

Post by tchalla »

guywithahat wrote: post #30

The whole thing is a colossal waste too, it was a law written by people who don't understand tech for special interest groups who don't want to actually make things better. If you don't want a website doing something on your computer, you start with the browser, not the website.

Future headlines after a browser compliance law made - “EU is destroying innovation!”

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#53

Post by gjsman-1000 »

diggan wrote: post #41
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But no one is gonna put a "10% of global turnover" as a fine immediately. You're dealing with the EU. Stupidly high fines happen weekly.

> You're dealing with the EU. Stupidly high fines happen weekly. Thank you for making it clear you wasn't taking the conversation seriously, I almost thought someone could hold opinions like that in real life, but I'm happy it wasn't so.

Tell that to Emanuel Macron, who has openly said that the EU might literally die functionally, if not politically, in just 2-3 years due to sheer economic lack of competitiveness.

"Our former model is over. We are overregulating and underinvesting. In the two to three years to come, if we follow our classical agenda, we will be out of the market."

"If we want clearly to be more competitive and have our place in this multipolar order; first, we need a simplification shock."

"The EU could die, we are on a verge of a very important moment."

https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-france-europ...

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#54

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

ben_w wrote: post #25
tonymet wrote: post #9

This destroyed the world wide web, which was the major driver of the internet as a consumer application. I'm referring to the experience of intelligent & creative publishers sharing content openly on the web. This did far more to destroy the world wide web than ads or tracking

Has Facebook ever not been hidden behind a login? Because even if that doesn't count as "intelligent & creative publishers", it certainly set a much harder trend to get around than the banners.

> Has Facebook ever not been hidden behind a login?

Yes. Not sure when they added the loginwall, but it was relatively recently, compared to my birth.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#55

Post by ryandrake »

People blame the cookie banners themselves or the legislation that "made them necessary" but somehow never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites that make them subject to the law.

The "cookie banner problem" exists because it's primarily end users that are shouldering the burden of them, and not the companies. For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software engineer to code up a banner. For everyone else, it's thousands of wasted seconds per year. Make the law hit companies where it hurts: their balance sheets.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#56

Post by jtbayly »

coldpie wrote: post #6

Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banner filters. Fixed. Enable the Annoyances filters too, while you're in there. If you're on iOS, the Kill Sticky bookmarklet does a decent job of cleaning these up without breaking most sites: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...

The most recent iOS (18) introduced a feature that lets you hide distracting things on the page. (Tap left side of the url field and select “Hide distracting items.” Then just tap what you want to remove and hit done.) I believe that they will stay hidden next time you visit the site.

Regardless, I use Hush and another blocker and it has still come in very handy several times already, so I thought others would want to know about it.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#57

Post by cluckindan »

diggan wrote: post #17
coldpie wrote: post #6

Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banner filters. Fixed. Enable the Annoyances filters too, while you're in there. If you're on iOS, the Kill Sticky bookmarklet does a decent job of cleaning these up without breaking most sites: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...

> Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banner filters (and enable the Annoyances filters too, while you're in there). Fixed. Except for the pesky sites that somehow disable (or rather "not enable") certain things until you've "answered" the banner. Can't remember what site I hit that on most recently, but I had to disable uBlock, reload the page, click "Deny", and then the video/element worked.

And by hitting that ”deny” button, you have ”consented” to hundreds if not thousands of data brokers around the world processing all your personal data gathered throughout your life across all your devices. They can now freely buy your data from other brokers to enrich their profile of you.

Should have unchecked those 973 legitimate interest checkboxes they hid under the ”affiliates” or ”vendors” or ”providers” or whatever.

Next, they will resell that profile to political campaigns, advertisers, law enforcement, private dicks and security providers, the military, foreign intelligence services and drug cartel hit squads, to name a few. You could buy it too! Or your friends, enemies, neighbors, colleagues, bosses…

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#58

Post by Alupis »

diggan wrote: post #51
Alupis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shame companies cannot live without tracking cookies Most cookies are entirely benign. Many cookies (or something like a cookie) are required for a website to operate normally. The EU law, while good intentioned, was/is too broad and failed to understand the realities of operating websites. This regulation has caused the entire world to be annoyed with useless cookie banners that 99% of people just reflexively clic…

> Most cookies are entirely benign. Many cookies (or something like a cookie) are required for a website to operate normally. The EU law was/is too broad - and has caused the entire world to be annoyed with useless cookie banners. Give reading the actual implementations a try. You'll quickly notice they actually thought of this. I wouldn't say it's "expertly crafted" by any means, but the banner is for a specific "cl…

You might try to argue many types of cookies are non-essential - but that would be because you lack experience in this domain.

Website operators have a right to study how people use their website just the same as a brick-and-mortar operator has the right to study how customers navigate their store isles.

The EU law compels a popup for these types of services/scripts and 99% of people just click through them because they are noise.

Lastly - the EU and it's laws don't matter. What are they going to do about non-compliant foreign websites? Nothing.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#59

Post by tonymet »

coldpie wrote: post #18
tonymet wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

content-based adblocking requires tremendous resources, and no longer works in Chrome, which is the primary browser.

So use Firefox.

tell that to the billion internet users who suffer from cookie banners. I'm talking about the network effect.

Re: Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

#60

Post by ben_w »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #13
diggan wrote: post #5

Correct URL: https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-... > This situation calls for an urgent revision of the ePrivacy Directive Shame companies cannot live without tracking cookies, and shame that the blame somehow end up on the regulation, rather than the companies who are the ones who introduce this cookie banner and "massive productivity loss". You know the best way of not having to put up coo…

> shame that the blame somehow end up on the regulation, rather than the companies who are the ones who introduce this cookie banner and "massive productivity loss" You can wish upon a star that humans weren’t the way we are. In the real world, this was a predictable response to a stupid rule. (And in some cases a necessary one. For example, for websites requiring a login or reliant on ads.) > know the best way of no…

> for websites requiring a login

They don't need consent for that.

> reliant on ads

Yes. For me, this has been eye-opening about how many different ad agencies there are snooping on my browsing history. It was bad enough when it was just the (UK) government passing a law to do that, now I've got websites with more "trusted partners" monitoring my every move than my high school had students.

> This is a nothing to hide argument

"Don't store PII" does not seem to be that, to me?

If anything, the opposite party gets that criticism, given that the default is allowing private agencies to spy on everyone?

Post reply on HN