EU to Facebook: ‘Drop Dead’. Ringing down the curtain on the consent theater (doctorow.medium.com)

I actually look forward to the return of decent ads. Up to the '80s, people actually bought magazines for the ads in them. I loved the old Marklin catalogs, the weird devices in electronic magazines, the games in game magazines, the software libraries and debugging tools in dev magazines.

Some of the hacker news posts are basically ads: 'Look what we made, buy it or invest in it.' I don't mind, in fact I find it interesting and inspiring what pops up. Sometimes I actually use it.

But the key here is contextual. This month on youtube, I get the same ad about some political party multiple times an hour. But I am not at all thinking about politics, so they only annoy me. If youtube would just show me an ad based on the content of the clip I am looking at, instead of guessing who I am and being wrong most of the time. We heard a song we liked on a random Youtube music channel and had to hunt down the title and artist to buy it. Just place a 'buy' button on there already.

The Guardians political bias is pro gdpr and yet their cookie consent form is such an antipattern. They present you with a wall of legalistic text and then threaten you with another one if you don't click the dystopian like label "I am happy". The default behaviour should always be a working site that requires no cookies. If some cookies are required they should tell you what these entail and you can say yes or not. Not present a handful of opaque options and hide what everyone wants, which is to use the site with minimal tracking.

Am I only one who thinks this is an over reach and there's no fundamental legal basis for these rulings... Like cookie banners