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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

#631

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

FredPret wrote: post #630
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily that's just 1 of the 4 options, and those 4 options are just 4 of many options, so no need to focus on 1 of many and say you don't like it: you can just choose another! Or you can choose to create the islands. I don't see what's so terrible about that. Did website operators think they could keep violating the rights of EU citizens indefinitely? I mean, based on enforcement capacity, chances are most operators…

You keep missing my point, possibly on purpose, so I'll end this here. The EU and the US and China disagree about what user rights are and what reasonable behaviour for a website is. If one of those parties enforces their vision onto their traffic, it has a chilling effect - splittig the net into federations. By making GDPR super vague, the EU just makes everything worse, including for Europeans. If you disagree that…

As far as the GDPR goes, only webmasters choosing to ban entire countries of users out of greed (wanting to unfairly profit off users) or laziness (not caring enough about the privacy of their users) or spite (punishing users because you don't like the GDPR) can achieve the splitting you describe. If it happens, it would be their decision, and thus their fault.

Real talk though, again: you say you personally feel the GDPR is vague. If you have questions about the GDPR, ask them, and I'm sure smart folks at HN will be able to help you find answers and overcome obstacles. You can build and not break laws, whether GDPR or ITAR, we can help. If you have troubles building, share them with us, let us advise you. Nobody's saying it'll be zero work, but nobody's entitled to run a business doing whatever it wants with zero work, either, and shouldn't expect to.

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

#632

Post by aristofun »

gitaarik wrote: post #626
aristofun wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are “they”? And how my cookies exactly help push an agenda? Educate me step by step please using some simplified example.

By tracking people, they understand people's behavior, what hypes there are, what kind of things people are engaging with, interested in. Then they can target specific campaigns at certain groups of people, to manipulate their opinion, or exploit them. "They" are the ones that have control over the data. The ones that collect and process all the data, or the ones that buy it. Mostly FAANG and their clients, which are…

Do you realize that faang companies know everything about you already? With or without cookies.

Did you know that the bigger company is the easier it is for it to workaround those silly cookies limitations bureaucrats impose?

Did you look out the window recently? Did you notice any positive political changes after these stupid regulations took place?

What other evidence you need to admit it was a dumb and useless regulation? Even if it had originally a good intent to it.

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

#633

Post by LunaSea »

remotefonts wrote: post #627
LunaSea wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we all know how great countries with no free media do. Absolute dreams.

There's no free media. It's propaganda from all sides. And I suspect it always was like that.

Biased or not, it's still useful and need to be free.

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

#634

Post by rstuart4133 »

remotefonts wrote: post #616
rstuart4133 wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I don't mean that.

The post is dated 2022. The feature became generally available in v120. Stable is v123, so it is available now. It's gated, so you still have to enable it as described in the post.

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

#635

Post by gitaarik »

aristofun wrote: post #632
gitaarik wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By tracking people, they understand people's behavior, what hypes there are, what kind of things people are engaging with, interested in. Then they can target specific campaigns at certain groups of people, to manipulate their opinion, or exploit them. "They" are the ones that have control over the data. The ones that collect and process all the data, or the ones that buy it. Mostly FAANG and their clients, which are…

Do you realize that faang companies know everything about you already? With or without cookies. Did you know that the bigger company is the easier it is for it to workaround those silly cookies limitations bureaucrats impose? Did you look out the window recently? Did you notice any positive political changes after these stupid regulations took place? What other evidence you need to admit it was a dumb and useless reg…

It's mostly about making people aware. And it does have some effect. Maybe not much, but you have to start somewhere.

Imagine a group of people living in a big house that hasn't been maintained and cleaned in a long time. Then someone starts cleaning a little window. And someone says: look at the rest of the house, do you see any change? Well of course not, but you have to start somewhere. And maybe we didn't even use the right cleaning product or technique. But by doing it, we're learning about what works and what doesn't. And we might inspire other people, and they could start cleaning other parts of the house, and we can collectively make a significant change.

It's a slow process and it might seem impossible to some people. But it is possible. Look at history, if we never made any law and order we would still be walking around as wild men.

The change we would like to see might not even be in our own lifetime. But think of the next generations. They have to deal with what we leave behind. And I'm very happy our previous generations layed the foundations for law and order on which we can continue to build.

Yes things are not perfect and they will never be. But there's always room for improvement. And why not work towards improvement instead of deterioration. Why not have a positive outlook instead of a negative one.

I'm not saying you have to go out on the street and go protesting with billboards. But we can at least try to support each other improving the system. Again we have a long way to go, but there is hope. There always is. If there wasn't, we wouldn't be here.

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

#636

Post by nickpp »

ragnese wrote: post #606
nickpp wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies are under no legal obligation to make those banners as obnoxious as they are Actually every single lawyer we asked about implementing GDPR advised us to have one of those obnoxious banners. Because the law is so ambiguous and the penalties so high that is better to play it safe. And we have no ads nor tracking at all on our product website. You can ignore your lawyer's advice if you want, but it's a bit l…

If you are using cookies for user preferences/settings, then they require consent. If you are only using cookies for session information (like a shopping cart), then you don't have to get consent. Your lawyers know this. Frankly, I doubt the veracity of this anecdote. But even so, I'm willing to bet that the lawyers in this story did not tell you that the banners have to cover half the screen and have ambiguous wordi…

Are you a lawyer? Are you willing to assume the liability I may incur if I follow your advice? Or are you at least a business owner/manager who's had to deal with this crap?

Or are you in the peanut gallery willing to believe that there is some conspiracy where all websites have suddenly decided to obliterate their user's UX when GDPR appeared just because they are evil?

I live in the EU and I can tell you: ALL banners/popups are obnoxious. They ALL get in my way when I want to do something entirely different. As a (non ad/user-tracking) business I would never afflict them on my users if I had a choice.

The productivity loss here in EU since the GDPR would be staggering - if there was much productivity to begin with, of course.

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

#637

Post by mafuy »

webworker wrote: post #505
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.

Again, this should have been a >browser feature The proper way to have done this would have been to go to the W3C or WHATWG and proposed an extension to HTML for sites to define an opt-in manifest or something similar.

A feature that lets the browser tell websites "do-not-track the user"? From my knowledge of history, I'm afraid that would not work at all!

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

#638

Post by mafuy »

soerxpso wrote: post #556
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 flaw in your analogy is that the modal consumer cares about hidden fees, wants to be made aware of them, and might even make a different decision with that knowledge. The modal consumer does not care about cookies. Imagine you walk into a restaurant and they hand you a paper that details full allergy information for all of the foods they serve, and then they wait for you to say, "I consent to these ingredients be…

I am not allergic, then I do not need to know about it and I will suffer no damages from not caring. This is not the case for tracking. Tracking can hurt you.

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

#639

Post by pas »

nickpp wrote: post #596
bazoom42 wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that putting a “we use cookies” banner on your website will not absolve you from GDPR fines anyway. You still need to adher to the law about informend consent, storing safely etc. If you are worried about GDPR, by far the safest is to just not collect personal information.

You are correct: implementing GDPR correctly is much, much harder and more expensive than people realise. Cookie banners are just the tip of the iceberg. A few things not allowed under GDPR: 1. Analytics 2. Third-party resources like fonts or JS libraries 3. CDNs 4. DDOS protection services And I am sure I am missing many more. I am not a lawyer, but I worked with a few.

Okay, so either you know what you are talking about it or not. If not stop spreading nonsense, if yes, then why are you lying?

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

#640

Post by nickpp »

pas wrote: post #639
nickpp wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct: implementing GDPR correctly is much, much harder and more expensive than people realise. Cookie banners are just the tip of the iceberg. A few things not allowed under GDPR: 1. Analytics 2. Third-party resources like fonts or JS libraries 3. CDNs 4. DDOS protection services And I am sure I am missing many more. I am not a lawyer, but I worked with a few.

Okay, so either you know what you are talking about it or not. If not stop spreading nonsense, if yes, then why are you lying?

Do you have an actual argument or are you here just to call others liars?
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