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

71–80 of 395 posts

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

#71

Post by cluckindan »

immibis wrote: post #66
cluckindan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

If they're doing that after you clicked Deny, the government can come down hard on them. Sadly, only the government - individuals can't sue companies for GDPR violations.

Legitimate interest checkboxes are technically not asking for consent, they are considered informational. OneTrust popups are especially inflammatory in this regard.

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

#72

Post by legitster »

ryandrake wrote: post #55

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…

> never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites

Part of the problem is that the law didn't seek to distinguish between tame first-party cookies and the really naughty third-party cookies so the burden is equal regardless of how malicious the service is.

> For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software engineer to code up a banner.

This is actually not true. There's a lot more that goes into a cookie banner than you might realize, and there's now an industry dominated by a small handful of players (Osano vs OneTrust)

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

#73

Post by seeknotfind »

serial_dev wrote: post #67
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...

While I appreciate your workarounds, the issue is not fixed. Almost everyone is going to keep clicking these stupid banners. It’s not okay, it’s not fixed until the rules are adjusted and we have less tracking and’s less pointless banners.

So many pop-ups these days, for every little thing. Tracking. OS permissions. Browser permissions. Take a survey. Speak to our AI assistant. Do you agree to this. Donate. Sign up. Pay. So many clicks. Used to be viruses, but we have the same result with our complexity.

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

#74

Post by throwaway346434 »

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.

Enforced by companies who are doing shady things with data in the most inconvenient way, rather than listening to DoNotTrack or https://globalprivacycontrol.org/

Because if they can say "hey look over there, regulation bad"; they can escape regulation if it is repealed

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

#76

Post by diggan »

Alupis wrote: post #58
diggan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

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

I'm not arguing anything, read the directives and implementations yourself, then get back to me. While some might lack experience, others seem to lack reading comprehension. That's fine, we can always learn :)

> Website operators have a right to study how people use their website

In the EU, that depends. As a website operator at a certain scale, you cannot do whatever you want with personal data.

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

Yeah, I mean that's cool and all, but maybe you're spending time discussing in the wrong HN submission then? I don't go around in submissions about "Golang is bad" commentating how you wouldn't have those issues if you didn't use Golang in the first place. Not my idea of curious conversation at all.

Obviously EU directives and laws apply in EU

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

#77

Post by ben_w »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40
frereubu wrote: post #27

"All" the EU needs to do is to mandate adherence to the Do Not Track setting in browsers, but then vast swathes of businesses based on unwanted and unethical tracking would go bust, so we have this really shitty stalemate. All websites we build adhere to the Do Not Track setting and don't even show a cookie banner if it's set. The only question is whether we should show a message to say that we're not tracking people…

> but then vast swathes of businesses based on unwanted and unethical tracking would go bust, so we have this really shitty stalemate They’d be supplanted by foreign competitors. That’s the actual stalemate.

> They’d be supplanted by foreign competitors. That’s the actual stalemate.

Most of the ad trackers I'm aware of are already foreign to the EU, so that doesn't seem to be even an economic threat from the EU's perspective.

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

#78

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ryandrake wrote: post #55

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…

They don't technically even need a banner per se, just respect the user's "do not track" browser setting, or put it in a settings screen, or don't use any 3rd party trackers.

But a lot of businesses assume they need to ask permission for placing any cookies, which is simply not correct. Local analytics tracking is fine, it's only when the user can be tracked across multiple separate websites that they need explicit permissions. And the user should not be annoyed into making that decision.

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

#79

Post by RejectedChin »

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.

That's why they created DoNotTrack initially. Then browsers turned that on by default, ad revenue lowered, and sites/adcompanies decided to ignore it because it was turned on by default.

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

#80

Post by nicce »

legitster wrote: post #72
ryandrake wrote: post #55

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…

> never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites Part of the problem is that the law didn't seek to distinguish between tame first-party cookies and the really naughty third-party cookies so the burden is equal regardless of how malicious the service is. > For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software engineer to code up a banner. This is actually not true. T…

> There's a lot more that goes into a cookie banner than you might realize, and there's now an industry dominated by a small handful of players (Osano vs OneTrust)

Isn't this industry for those, who want to share their website data automatically with 100+ partners? For others, who don't really share that much data with others, less relevant.

Post reply on HN