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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

#611

Post by itishappy »

tekknik wrote: post #577
itishappy wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

not the same, you’re paying for car insurance and they offer you a discount if you allow tracking. most sites using tracking are providing you something for no monetary cost to you, instead by showing you targeted ads

It's not that different, let's make it the same.

Welcome to my new insurance company! Thanks for requesting a quote (it's free! the quote, not the insurance), my agent will swing by to install a GPS chip while you sleep. We're not doing anything malicious with it, we just give you call whenever you're within 5 miles of one of our locations. We'll put it in the bin the vehicle manufacturer conveniently installed for us to hold all the trackers grocery stores and shopping malls use to offer free parking, which you can of course empty out at any time (it's clearly labeled once you remove the oil pan).

What's this, a shopping center now asks before installing a GPS chip on my car (but still somehow offers free parking if I decline)? How inconvenient!

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

#612

Post by remotefonts »

LunaSea wrote: post #439
alistairSH wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This means you get less money for it and can't survive due to the lesser revenue.

And not surviving would.be the best outcome in a large number of cases.

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

#613

Post by gitaarik »

aristofun wrote: post #605
gitaarik wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could look at it like this: Big websites are tracking people, unknowingly to them, giving them lots of power, because information is power these days. And the sites that treat their customers fairly and honestly, ie they just want to offer you their product/service and are not interested in making a profit from your information, are not highlighted for their good intentions. This law makes the difference clear…

> And I understand that most people don't care because they are ignorant about the issues and consequences No, people don’t care because there are no consequences. Except just better targeTed ads. Most people on HN are hackers, they know exactly how this works. If you were brainwashed to be scared - doesn’t mean I as a user must pay for it with my attention.

What do you mean no consequences? Haven't you heard they use this data to manipulate public opinion to push certain political agendas? And that is just one example of the tip of the iceberg. Information is power. They are not collecting it just for fun.

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

#614

Post by aristofun »

gitaarik wrote: post #613
aristofun wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I understand that most people don't care because they are ignorant about the issues and consequences No, people don’t care because there are no consequences. Except just better targeTed ads. Most people on HN are hackers, they know exactly how this works. If you were brainwashed to be scared - doesn’t mean I as a user must pay for it with my attention.

What do you mean no consequences? Haven't you heard they use this data to manipulate public opinion to push certain political agendas? And that is just one example of the tip of the iceberg. Information is power. They are not collecting it just for fun.

Who are “they”? And how my cookies exactly help push an agenda?

Educate me step by step please using some simplified example.

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

#615

Post by FredPret »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #610
FredPret wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually self-host all my web assets and use Matomo already. So I do actually agree with the premise. What I object to strenuously is someone dictating terms to the world from distant shores, especially since they seem not to get how the internet works (it’s all funded by ads, online sales, and ads for online sales, all of which involve metrics and tracking!) The diktats I mentioned include a ruling that Google Fon…

Please tone down the hyperbolic rhetoric and FUD. Consider how strongly you can make your point without them. To the point: Nobody in Europe is "dictating terms to the world", or "issuing diktats", meaning passing citizen-supported legislation I guess, or affecting your business, unless you're trying to deal with their citizens' data. > The diktats I mentioned include a ruling that Google Fonts are illegal now. So if…

Here's the problem.

> 1. Don't process EU citizen data (block them).

Many webmasters have neither the time nor inclination to read up on EU law. So blocking is the easiest and safest solution to minimize our legal risks. This is absolutely terrible - I grew up dreaming of an internet that is really humanity's network; not islands separated by political allegiance.

I agree that I can tone it down, but 99.99% of the FUD around is directly the fault of the EU for not making it crystal clear what the theory and practice around their internet laws will be.

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

#616

Post by remotefonts »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #550
pokot0 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you are using a browser provided by an ad company surely being nagged to death to provide data they can sell is the expected outcome? You could use Firefox, which can disable most cookie banners [0]. [0] https://community.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/firefox-cookie-ba...

You mean we can use the development version of Firefox, which gets almost daily updates and also breaks things a lot of times. An important caveat.

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

#617

Post by zelphirkalt »

zpeti wrote: post #539
zelphirkalt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using anything Google on your website without asking for consent before loading it from Google, is in my definition quite sketchy. It may be either uninformed, no conscience, or not properly thinking about the ethics of ones choices, or whatever, but it is definitely not right and not ethical to do so. I am quite happy with regulations coming down on people and especially businesses, who continue to do this.

Many websites that you rely on would not be around if it wasn’t for Google ads. You think it’s some sort of choice you have between being tracked or not, but it’s not, it’s between having a fairly decentralised internet or not. And unfortunately with recent google SEO changes almost all small blogs at this point have been wiped out. Googles own properties, Reddit and Quora, and large websites like NYT and CNET are th…

Do you mean a generalized "you", as in general Internet using population, or do you mean me in particular? If the later, I would ask, how you know what websites I personally rely on and perhaps state, which sites you think those are. I am quite far from the norm in that aspect, but maybe there is something I can further cut away.

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

#618

Post by ankit219 »

account42 wrote: post #502
ankit219 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that law tries to dictate UX more than just set groundrules which good laws do. They pre-emptively set the law such that it prevents any use when the focus is on misuse. The law is about 1st party and 3rd party cookies, not just 3rd party. In an ideal case, if it was just a law, a simpler wording could be "you are allowed to collect anonymized data, but not monetize/share it without permission from users.…

Usage data is NOT needed to improve your website. > Moreover, it's vaguely worded so we companies do not know if they have committed a GDPR offence. Only if they are trying to skirt the law.

If it was so clear, why do we have European courts giving clarifications now that were not clear at the time of original law? like this: https://www.gdprsummary.com/cookie-consent-must-be-an-active...

notice the part about how purposes cannot be bundled together. EU's own website does that till date.

> NOT needed to improve your website

When I say usage data, aggregated data about how many people bounced off my page, or how long it took for my webpage to load under different internet connections is absolutely needed for me to make sure every user that comes on the page is having a good enough experience. I may not save any info, but those numbers are definitely used in aggregate. if the bounce rate is too high, content is not useful for people i am reaching. If i cant know that, how does the webpage gets better. That is usage data. I do not care about who the person is, but I would want to know whether it was one person doing one action 100 times or 100 different people doing the same action. Makes a massive difference.

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

#619

Post by master-lincoln »

zpeti wrote: post #608
master-lincoln wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You attributed a medical diagnose to me for saying something that is possibly uninformed. That makes me not ever want to have a conversation with you again. Just food for thought... Turns out you were the uninformed one. From the context through parent posts you can clearly see this was about a website using google adsense and by that, the company sells my info to an external (google) which then tries to take advanta…

“ Turns out you were the uninformed one. From the context through parent posts you can clearly see this was about a website using google adsense and by that, the company sells my info to an external (google) which then tries to take advantage of me to extract money from me.” This is not how it works. You might not be medically delusional but you are saying things that are not true.

Which part is not true and why do you think so?

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

#620

Post by [deleted] »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #444
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The law isn't that bad actually I've clicked 3 cookie banners today alone and its not even 2pm yet. How many cookie banners have I clicked in my life so far? How many cookie banners can I expect to click over the remaining 40-50 years of my life? The law is objectively bad.

>The law is objectively bad. No, the websites you visit are probably bad. Which cookies did you have to accept/reject? What do they do? Why do the websites believe they must ask you to accept them? Also, the law allow browsers to automatically accept/reject the cookies on your behalf (actually, the law does not care about which specific technology the websites use to collect and process personal data). You, as a user…

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