If that's true, I'd have to agree that the EU is doing very, very, very well if that is the biggest fail. Unlikely to be true though, for better or worse.
I am about as far from Europe as you can get, and I think my fellow kiwis also spent an inordinate about of time clicking EU mandated cookie banners.
Cookies should be enforced in the browser. I think all the major browsers block third party cookies now. Bad actors can use other fingerprints to do tracking.
No "cookie banner" is required UNLESS you are using cookies to track me or personally idetify me.... in which case, you must ask my explicit consent to do so.
Blame the parasitic adtech industry wanting trade your personal data. Not the EU for providing you with consumer protection.
> Blame the parasitic adtech industry wanting trade your personal data.
Blame them for what? We all understand that personal information is the currency that pays for these services. While we may not love that we have to pay (who does?), we accept it as a fair trade. Until governments get their ass in gear to make paying with more favourable currencies viable, that is going to remain, now just with extra clicks.
> Not the EU for providing you with consumer protection.
I guess a bandaid is better than nothing, but we'd be better off if the EU would tackle the real issue. Going there would ruffle some real feathers, though, so good luck. But if there is blame to go around, it is on the EU for being too afraid to ruffle them.
And the problem with the GDPR. In a typical market situation the onus is on the buyer to first offer payment. The beggar on the street saying "Sir, can you spare some personal information?" is not how anyone likes to do business.
But that's where the GDPR has left things, thinking the problem is with the vendor, when in reality the problem is with the consumer spending beyond their means. Fair enough that the consumer needs protection from themselves, but, when it is a spending problem, why does that not come in the form of legal mandates over how one's wallet is used?
Of course, this would be improved in a much better way if, again, governments would actually tackle the real problem.
No, everyone does not understand that and companies were not transparent with what they do with the data, what data they collected and who they shared it with. Not to mention, if you consider it a payment-like transaction, surely you'll want to give consent instead of blindly trusting random websites? These are some of the problems GDPR solves.
What are the services? Leave out sites where you pay for something with money, or banks, or subscription sites. Those often have tracking too, but they could exist without it. What services are the free ones providing?
News is a special case, paying for journalism is a problem. Other than that:
* Videos and images
* Forums and blogs
* Databases like IMDB
* Random bits of information you want once in your life
I'm struck by how the presence of any amount of website design makes all these things worse. It's not only too easy for them to get our data, it's too hard for us to get their data, because the presentation and theatrical impression of being a service is all self-aggrandizing and works to delay and capture users for more tracking and ads. All we really want is servers, not services.
If somehow storage and processing was paid for by magical pixies, and available as a utilitarian series of gray bulletin boards with identical design, that would be much better than all the bloated sites that track visitors. It's wrong to portray this as a bargain in which we respect and appreciate some sort of service, and therefore ought to pay for it, because there is no service. They're not being paid for providing something wonderful, they're being paid for having got there first and for being well-known, or promoting themselves.
> 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 cookie banners on your website? Don't store PII in cookies. You know the best way of not having to care about GDPR? Don't store PII.
> 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 not having to care about GDPR? Don't store PII
This is a nothing to hide argument [1]. Proving compliance with GDPR is tedious and expensive even if you’re fully compliant. (Proving no jurisdiction is easier.)
> this was a predictable response to a stupid rule
It was predictable that ultimately people would blame the regulation instead of the companies? Not sure I understand what you mean, and even if you meant what I think you meant, not sure what the point is? People blame all sorts of things all the time...
Edit since you've added more to your comment
> Proving compliance with GDPR is tedious
That's my point. No need to prove compliance if GDPR doesn't apply.
Except it's not that black and white. If you follow the regulation too loosely, you get warnings. If you then ignore the problem, you'd get bigger problems. 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.
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."
> I've worked with two firms that have faced GDPR complaints. It's "up to", not "immediately on your first offence".
It's not specifically GDPR - it's the degree of overregulation in every sector, for almost every aspect of doing business. I was also speaking facetiously about large companies in particular - for example, just 12 hours ago, Facebook got hit with another $700 million fine. You don't have to be Facebook for the chilling effect. Or, the EU's stuff with Apple, the $12 billion fine against the will of Ireland, which has Apple assessing the profitability of even being in Europe.
> for example, just 12 hours ago, Facebook got hit with another $700 million fine. You don't have to be Facebook for the chilling effect
This one?
"The EU fined online giant Meta almost 800 million euros on Thursday for breaching antitrust rules by giving users of its Facebook social network automatic access to classified ads service Facebook Marketplace." - https://fortune.com/europe/2024/11/14/eu-fines-meta-840-mill...
Because if so, that's going to have the opposite of a chilling effect, as it is anti-trust.
Likewise, what Apple got with Ireland, while Apple has to pay, it's something Ireland did wrong by illegally giving Apple a tax dodge to encourage it to base itself in Ireland rather than anywhere else in Europe — if that's "chilling": good. We don't want tax-dodgers. If Apple can't be profitable in Europe without dodging taxes, something's gone very badly wrong for them.
Now, I'm not saying the EU doesn't over-regulate, as that kind of claim about any government is like saying that a software project contains zero functions that are never invoked by a user. But I am saying the scope of your rhetoric is not sufficiently supported by the evidence provided.
After multiple warnings and lawsuits, sure. Conform to the rules if you don't want the fines. But these companies are so big and rich, they'd rather break the rules and risk a fine than give up on their sweet data. And even if they get sued, they have armies of lawyers - still cheaper to spend millions on lawyers than pay a hundreds of millions fine.
> predictable that ultimately people would blame the regulation instead of the companies
It was predictable this would result in disclosure/consent spam.
> No need to prove compliance if GDPR doesn't apply
If you are in the EU, GDPR applies. It may not be relevant. But you’re subject to it and its regulatory arms. (And if you have a competitor in the EU, it’s known practice you can waste time and money with requests and complaints.)
Both laws’ aims are noble. But they require tweaks. Starting with the cookie banners would be smart.
> If you are in the EU, GDPR applies. It may not be relevant. But you’re subject to it and its regulatory arms.
I think you might be missing that I'm talking about this from the companies perspective, not from the perspective of a person inside EU.
If the company doesn't store any "personal data", GDPR has nothing to do with it. It's strictly about "personal data" as defined here: https://gdpr.eu/article-4-definitions/
> (And if you have a competitor in the EU, it’s known practice you can waste time and money with requests and complaints.)
Happen to have any quotes/sources for this? Would be the first time I've come across it myself. I'm genuinely interested in if it's being misused like that.
> If the company doesn't store any "personal data", GDPR has nothing to do with it. It's strictly about "personal data"
You’re still obligated to respond to requests, even if it’s no response. And data regulators will still follow up on groundless complaints.
DMCA is strictly about copyright violation. If you’re not violating copyrights it should have nothing to do with you. But that isn’t how things play out in reality.
> have any quotes/sources for this?
No, just anecdotal. Every Magic Circle firm, however, will happily file complaints in multiple jurisdictions for you.
I’ll admit I’ve used GDPR a touch vindictively after a customer service interaction went poorly. Lots of requests, wait for a minor fuck-up, escalate to multiple data regulators because I technically have multiple nexuses. European equivalent of copying your state AG on a letter, except the burden to respond is on the company.
I built a GDPR request deletion system for a company right as GDPR came into effect. In the first year the only requests that came in were from privacy advocates and competitors.
I don’t know if after that it saw more natural usage but I doubt it.
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?
Saying you don’t need to worry about GDPR if you don’t keep PII is the “nothing to hide” argument. There is still a cost to demonstrating compliance that goes beyond complying.
Maybe an analogy will make it click: If you have marijuana on you in a country where marijuana is illegal, then finding marijuana on you is illegal. If you don't have marijuana on you, you're not doing anything illegal.
Replace marijuana with "personal data" and imagine it is about websites with visitors within EU. If they're not storing, processing and/or transmitting personal data, there is no compliance requirements (from GDPR at least).
> If you have marijuana on you in a country where marijuana is illegal, then finding marijuana on you is illegal. If you don't have marijuana on you, you're not doing anything illegal
This is a good analogy. By making the marijuana illegal, you also implicitly widen search powers. You can’t arrest someone you think smells like weed if weed is legal. (Or answer a neighbor’s complaint that they suspect they’re growing weed.)
Same idea. If you say you aren’t storing personal data and I say you are, someone’s got the authority to check. Those checks and confirmations cost time and money. With a complain-investigate set-up like GDPR (and American securities law), the burden is on the respondent.
> You can't arrest someone by smelling like weed in any democracy where it's illegal either.
isn't true. Sweden is super strict on usage and if even a "normal" person and/or neighbour would smell weed from you or your place they'd definitely call the cops on you. If a cop smelled weed on you in public you'd get arrested immediately no doubt.
I'm sorry, but I was partially pulling a No True Scotsman on that part.
If some random policeman can look at you, decide to arrest you with no real evidence, and it's all legal, that a huge Human Rights violation right there.
How does a judge deal with this? Do they rush to smell the culprit too?
> 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 click through - just like all of California's Prop65 warnings are ignored today.
> Don't store PII.
These hard-line statements defy reality. Many websites have legitimate need to store PII.
> You know the best way of not having to care about GDPR?
Don't be in the EU?
Just ignore it. There are no consequences. If you don't have physical presence within the EU - there's little-to-zero the EU can do about it. The EU can think it's laws apply to the world all it wants - but the world disagrees.
> Many cookies (or something like a cookie) are required for a website to operate normally
"Essential Cookies" do not need a consent banner.
Case in point: Hacker News is 100% compliant AFAIK and has no banner.
> Many websites have legitimate need to store PII.
If there is actual legitimate interest or legal requirements, such as collecting an address for delivering a package or performing fraud-prevention, there is also no need for cookie banners.
And if that data is "transferred" to a 3rd party for that analysis (aka. a REST call into their API) then you are back to requiring these annoying banners.
Or, more common for ecommerce, "transferred" into an advertising algorithm so the business can gain more similar customers. Oh the horror!
What does "for that analysis" refers to? Fraud prevention?
If so, it is legitimate interest to do fraud prevention, so there's no need for a consent banner, first or third-party. Naturally you can't go and use this data for a purpose that has no basis under legitimate interest.
Another example: Cloudflare is running DDoS prevention under our noses here at HN, for example, but there's no need to ask for consent, even though Cloudflare is a third-party. Why? Because this is considered legitimate interest.
> Or, more common for ecommerce, "transferred" into an advertising algorithm so the business can gain more similar customers
For this you do need consent, if you transfer PII. If you don't want a banner you can replace it with a simple checkbox during the checkout process. Not only less hostile, but also more transparent than a banner.
To understand how customer's shop on my website. Heatmaps, view port, device type, screen resolution, frequency of browsing, where their mouse hovers the most, page dwell time, etc.
These are impossible tasks for most website operators to do themselves.
> For this you do need consent, if you transfer PII. If you don't want a banner you can replace it with a simple checkbox during the checkout process. Not only less hostile, but also more transparent than a banner.
Or... you can just ignore the EU because the EU doesn't matter. You know, like I originally asserted?
> If you don't want a banner you can replace it with a simple checkbox during the checkout process
This is the sort of mindset that crafted this poorly designed regulation in the first place. Most website operators are not going to willingly add a barrier at the final step of a conversion.
If you are going to use my property and resources - it's my rules or don't come. Pretty simple...
You don't need banners just because something is third-party. If there is no PII and/or legitimate consent, you don't need a banner. There are GDPR compliant analytics platforms, fraud prevention, third-party payment gateways, for example. They don't need banners.
As for the rest, it's quite inflammatory and I don't know how it relates to my comment, so I'll refrain from answering.
You don’t need banners period. The EU doesn’t get to tell people how to operate their web properties. If EU citizens don’t like it, they can stop visiting those properties. Even simpler.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
The EU designed these regulations to be viral and compel the world into compliance. The world does not need to comply, and largely does not. Multinational corporations with physical presence within the EU need to comply - but nobody else does, nor should they.
> read the directives and implementations yourself, then get back to me.
So we're arguing this down-thread of an article claiming our fuzzy European friends wasted nearly 600,000,000 hours last year clicking "I Accept" over and over? Seems like a well-designed regulation that's totally working super-duper well for the EU. Totally cut down on cookies!
> 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.
I think reasonable people can disagree about this, and if enough reasonable people think that a web site operator should not have that "right" then they should be able to pass legislation to curtail it.
As a user, I say I should have the right to control what data is collected by what company, and what they should be allowed to do with it. I should be empowered to decide what kind of data is "essential" for a company to collect about me, not the company. Reasonable people could disagree with me, too. These are not laws of physics.
Why is this different than a brick-and-mortar to you? Do people feel they are "private" when shopping in a retail store with AI cameras tracking patterns and behavior, names and purchases collected at checkout, loyalty "discount" cards to get even more data, etc? Even without your name, they can identify you by recognition alone, aka. an anonymized cookie used to track a specific user's behavior.
Somehow people think visiting someone else's private website grants them privileges to be entirely anonymous - it does not anymore so than shopping in a physical retail store.
If we keep going down this path, websites will require a full ToS/EULA just to access the site...
For the record, I don't think brick and mortar stores should have an automatic right to surveil and study the personal information of in-person customers without their consent but I agree that ship has largely sailed.
Yes, and I'm glad I can at least now tell such sites from others. Not allowing such malicious compliance would be better, but this is still an improvement over websites stealing data with no way of telling it happens
> 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.
This can be done without a cookie banner, as long as no PII is collected for the purposes of that analysis.
Sure, physical stores can do that in certain way, certainly they cannot reverse pickpocket GPS trackers into our pockets or stalk us around the city. You can ask your customers how they found about your store but they can lie or simply not answer. Cameras in the store? Fine. Cameras in the store bathroom? Not ok.
It is a legitimate interest to understand where your customers are coming from and this can be done without cookies in an anonymous fashion. Similarly, you can understand what people purchase together in an anonymous fashion. Cookies and PII aren't needed for any of this.
Cookies and PII are only necessary when you are trying to surreptitiously correlate people's purchase pattern with something that you shouldn't legitimately know like their sexuality or any given aspect of their identity.
> Lastly - the EU and it's laws don't matter. What are they going to do about non-compliant foreign websites? Nothing.
Rightly so. But if your third party processor is operating in the EU they will hold them liable for processing the data on EU citizens you send them without consent. That is between the EU and your provider.
> You know the best way of not having to care about GDPR? Don't store PII.
I hear this a lot. As an American that hosts casual personal websites, I can't help but worry that I'm in violation of the GDPR.
For example, my router logs connections for debugging. And my NGinx server maintains server logs for debugging.
These contain IP addresses. I'm pretty sure those are considered PII under GDPR. And there are a lot of things I think that follow from that, things I haven't bothered to look into or implement. Like whatever policies, disclaimers, notifications, request handling processes, etc. that need to be in place to gather those logs.
Whether or not I need a registered agent in the EU to host my website seems to be rather fuzzy too. It seems to come down to how "sensitive" the data I store in my logs are?
Its also not clear to me whether my home router is subject to GDPR if it receives and logs a packet that was sent to it by an EU citizen, regardless of whether there was a public internet service hosted on that router or not.
I mostly choose to not think about these things - but that nagging concern that my entire self-hosted digital presence violates European law does linger.
I get it, but you’re not in violation if you never pass those logs to anyone.
GDPR is intentionally obfuscated and made scary by people who have an interest in others thinking the regulation is onerous and silly (so that it is eventually changed/removed).
The regulation is not very hard to read, I would recommend you do it if you haven’t and boils down to: “don’t pass on (process) information without informed consent, if someone requests that you remove their account you should do so- and also don’t keep records around, and do your best not to let anyone access personal information”, the last one is technically unenforceable, but exists to prevent people leaving open access to data processors and bypassing consent more than anything else. A secondary benefit is that people take access controls a little more seriously by forcing breach disclosures.
Even the cookie banners are not needed unless you’re setting cookies for data collection, especially for third-parties!
There is a distinct irony in that all the online simplifications (“gdpr for dummies”, “the 7 things to comply with for gdpr”) are misleading and harder to read than the actual text of the regulation.
EDIT; I was foolish to post this during the peak time for US people. It feels like the Americans want the GDPR to be perceived as a pain.
Actually, all the cases you mentioned does not necessitate any consent from European users as long as you don't send these data to any third party. The only thing is, if you plan to store logs over time, it should be anonymized after 25 months. It's not that bad.
You are not EU based, you are not a processor/controller operating in the union, public international law doesn't grant EU law jurisdiction: the GDPR has no direct effect on you.
It could be that you are running ads and your ad provider is a processor in the EU and because they cannot handle jurisdictional consent well they attempt to pawn that off onto you in your terms and conditions. EU law has already decided that they cannot turn a blind eye however, if you aren't collecting consent then your processor has to assume that consent isn't given.
So yeah, worry about your contracts with third parties that might try to sneak in liability transfers and how your own jurisdiction would deal with that. If your provider is transferring that kind of liability maybe they are trying to also make you liable in the case that their ad installs a virus, so I hope you are already aware of such third party liability transfers in your contracts if your jurisdiction allows for such things.
OP should not be downvoted for asking genuine questions and concerns.
This type of downvoting on HN is getting silly and needs to stop.
(And a thanks to those who did respond to OP with the advice he is not in GDPR violation. Frankly, a worrying number of HN readers are clueless about legislation that directly affects them, whether they like it or not.)
That's not true. On average any overhead in browsing performance introduced by ad blocking is compensated by the elimination of tracking and ads elements of the pages. It saves bandwidth and are better for UX. We can argue about business models but claiming it requires tremendous resources is not true.
And content-based ad blocking still works in chrome but in much more limited capability compared to superior browser like Firefox.
Switched to edge at work and Safari at home/mobile hasn't been a huge issue. Firefox is my secondary. Although I no longer do much web debugging, the switch from edge to chrome wasn't too painful.
I don't have the evidence with me, but from what I've seen content-based blocking actually saves resources, both load times and memory. It's because Ads are not actually free or even cheap, you have to make a third-party request, load some content and JavaScript. So, if you spend a little to find and block those requests, you end up saving resources on average.
> 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…
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.
Legitimate interest can absolutely be opted-out of:
(f) processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child.
That doesn't say you can opt out. It says sometimes legitimate interests aren't enough. For example, as a hypothetical service provider I have a legitimate interest in tracking your GPS location everywhere you go, because it helps me predict what kind of service my customers like based on where they live and work. However, your right to not be tracked is more important, so I can't use my legitimate interest to justify the tracking in this case.
Let’s team up the pissed off individuals and raid-sue one of the obviously abusing. One is nothing, but that could at least make more visibility of the borderline legality. And at best we win and go to the next one.
So effectively, they're in the clear. The law also say not opting in should be as clear and asy as opting in, yet that is the case approximately 0% of the time.
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.
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.
It's not complex. It's simple. It's greed. It's absolutely ridiculous that we as a species put up with all of this nonsense because we have a faulty foundational understanding of what is and should be normal. The brain rot that we've subjected ourselves to is absolutely ludicrous.
You can always find disagreement if you look for it. Maybe this is your thing, given user name, your account makes an interesting study on it. Though in this case, I wouldn't be so reductive. Not all complexity (I ascribe to the result) is due to bad intentions (e.g. greed). There's also the EU GDPR trying to protect kids. AI assistant might be a tool to try to help users. If you want to simplify the cause here, how about a lack of focus or failure to tame the complexity of the world with our technologies, or tendency to add rather than delete?
It’s not a tracking banner but a cookie banner and some applications have a legitimate need for cookies. They abuse what is legitimate, but you can’t ask regulators to check every site without a national (European?) white liste firewall (shouldn’t give them ideas…).
Also, most tracking used to use cookies but if that becomes illegal there’s others ways.
the same way that they interact with any other web page? which never need banners? You don't need a banner to opt in or out (or ignore).
By this I mean the law is what it is but the implementation is deliberately hurting the visitors in the hope that they will click "yeah sure whatever" to be let through to the content. The harm does not come from the legislation but is deliberately anti-user by the web site owner. (Fine, in some cases it might be out of the box and merely lazy.)
Right but that's not optional cookies functioning at all, that's simply rejecting them altogether. Why not just say that? It's also a much easier sentiment to agree with than these confusing semantics about optional cookies working fine if you just ignore the banner.
Do Not Track header? It's the silver bullet but the stakeholders will argue it is invalid and cannot possibly be used to inform the server that the client wishes not to be tracked
Filters are unreliable, it is better to have the cookies banners automatically filled out via Consent-O-Matic: https://consentomatic.au.dk/
Which works on Chrome, Firefox and iOS.
The best part is that you can actually specify your preferences, but globally for all websites. I actually prefer to have the functionality cookies enabled.
I just figured it out. You bookmark a normal website. Then you go to your bookmarks and edit the new entry you created; you can then change the URL to the javascript code. Finally, to activate the bookmarklet you have to tap on the address bar and then manually browse to the bookmark entry (it doesn’t work if you just type its name in the address bar and press Go, or if you select it from the suggestions list).
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.
I think you two are talking about different things and are both correct. Facebook indeed had a login page back then, but you could use direct links to read public posts. Today it's roughly the same, but when you go to a direct link it shows a "Login Wall" that pesters you to sign up.
Also quite a few people (mostly from the north) fighting this idiocy.
In general: Southern+Central EU wants to build a new USA. Northern states meanwhile want to reduce the power of the EU. A common market is really the only thing we want.
> In general: Southern+Central EU wants to build a new USA. Northern states meanwhile want to reduce the power of the EU. A common market is really the only thing we want.
As someone from the north (specifically Sweden) who now lives in the south (specifically Spain), I'm not sure there is majority in either places, either directions, to state this with confidence. Lots of swedes are happy with EU and wants to make it stronger, and lots of Spaniards who had enough of EU and wants it weaker.
Maybe it looks differently in the center/eastern parts, haven't spent much time there admittedly.
If websites respected Do Not Track then things would be a lot easier. I think we need a right to be listened to. Right now it's enough online to insist on only accepting information in one particular way, like having a noreply email and making people login and submit since shitty web form to respond. Putting your hands over your ears and tape over your mail slot doesn't work in real life, it shouldn't work on the web either.
I agree with you 100%, but to be ideologically consistent, we should admit that websites have as much of a right to ignore Do Not Track as we have to ignore their tracking scripts.
Not if it comes from "consumer protection", as opposed to "your computer, your rules."
Treading down the latter too far leads into weird realms like "Hacking? I didn't make your computer do X, I simply sent it messages, it's your fault for not controlling its behavior."
"Rights" are sort of a hollow concept compared to how society ought to function and are just a crappy workaround our society's inability to resolve basic conflict.
The internet is broken and I don't think it's only in the EU. In the last years I found myself just avoiding using websites I'm not familiar with or confident they're not filled with ads and trackers, I've set-up some aggregators and custom readers to find and get the information I'm interested in. If I open a page that has the cookie banner that blocks me from reading the content or forces me to agree I just close it, it wouldn't have been that important anyway.
"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 because we see they've asked us not to! It's possibly a bit easier for us because we work primarily in the non-profit sector where ethics are perhaps a little higher up the agenda.
Because I use fresh incognito mode for each browsing session, I have to click through those consent popups on every website I visit. Quite frustrating to say the least.
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.
You shouldn't need any kind of law here. Consumers have 100% of the power as it stands in regards to browser tracking. The innovation should be in browsers and plugins, not donottrack flags or compliance laws.
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
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.
1. Do not track was not the browser deciding what to do (that would be a similar shape as Firefox multi-account containers and incognito mode). It was a machine-readable way to tell the site what to do; ie the same incorrect model as the click-through banners we have now, just non-interactive.
2. It was intended to be a way to communicate an actual intent from the user. Once it was set by default, it ceased to be an indicator of user intent.
> Once it was set by default, it ceased to be an indicator of user intent.
This presumes that it isn’t the default user position. There are three people on the planet who actually want ad tracking, and they’re welcome to go change the setting, but default off was the correct setting.
It's not about your computer, it's about your data. Tracking cookies are just one aspect. The GDPR is about consent and ownership of your personal data. It literally defines your rights with regard to your pesonal data.
The GDPR and ePrivacy directive aren't just about cookies. They limit what a company can do with your data in general, who can access it and how long. Cookie banners are just a downstream consequence of it and the reason they're bad is that most companies try to be clever and design them maliciously in ways to coerce you into "opting in" even though this makes them non-compliant.
If DPAs were serious about enforcing the law, every single website not giving at least equal visual weight to the "refuse all and continue" button (or hiding it behind other options or using individual "legitimate interest" toggle buttons to sneak in their partners despite the existence of the toggle button invalidating the claim of "legitimate interest") would be punished with the maximum fine because they have purposefully and maliciously violated the law.
> it was a law written by people who don't understand tech
On the contrary; data protection law was written precisely by those who understand tech and the dangers of companies using it to gather and share your personal data.
It's utterly bizarre people get annoyed for being asked explicit, opt-in consent to gather and share personal data on a case by case basis (as the law demands!), rather than get annoyed at the scummy SV adtech surveillance capitalists for seeking to share your data without consent.
(Once again, "cookie banners" are not required if you aren't tracking me or gathering personal data. Case in point, Hacker News sets cookies and is entirely compliant with no need to ask any permissions from me)
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.
> 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)
> 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.
If you are just running a static websites, maybe. But if you are going to run a website with any services on it (video content, eCommerce, member management, etc) you are going to have partners. Establishing a browser session with every single one would be pretty onerous (and honestly much worse for privacy) so a first-party cookie is a pretty good compromise.
> But if you are going to run a website with any services on it (video content, eCommerce, member management, etc) you are going to have partners.
No? At least not in the scale that would require these consent services. Services like member management are literally required to operate the website so those can go into the privacy policy (as would e.g. hosting on AWS or using a CDN).
The reason these consent services exist is that a lot of websites are just content mills that operate entire on behavioral advertising, whether it's the web version of a newspaper or just SEO blog spam. These often use hundreds of "partners" for analytics, ads, targeting, re-targeting, etc. And they desperately try to trick visitors into opting into those.
I keep seeing this misinformation going around, and it has been going around since almost day 1 of when the directive became known. I'm not sure where it's coming from, or who initially thought it worked like that, but judging by the comments in this submission it seems like a ton of people are very misinformed about how these things actually work.
The first step is data minimization. The second step is informed and revokable consent. Everything else follows from there.
Do targeted ads increase the amount of personal data that needs to be stored and processed and the number of entities that will access it? Yes they do. Are they required for the site to serve its stated purpose? No, unless the site is marketing itself as literally a curated stream of targeted ads. So they require informed and revokable consent (i.e. opt-in). Even if you think they're beneficial to the user.
It's not about what's beneficial. It's about what's required. That's why most sites try to group services by categories like "functional", "analytics", etc. If you want to embed a Google Maps view to help people find your physical store, that's beneficial but still requires consent because it shares their data with a third party (i.e. Google) when the browser loads that map. Of course in this case you don't even need a banner, you could just have a placeholder (often called "content blocker") instead of the map with the option to consent to loading the map and storing that decision so the user doesn't have to see the placeholder again.
The elephant in the room is that almost no one wants to host website without at least some sort of website analytics service, which does not fall under legitimate use. So that's why even a small blog is going to have a cookie banner.
There are some analytics companies out there that advertise cookieless analytics, but they are either a) too simple for enterprise or b) a much, much worse privacy and compliance risk.
Even this can be done without a banner, as long as these analytics do not contain any way to link them to individuals/specific users
It's admittedly sound advice to create a banner for such a usecase however, as sanitizing all user data from these events is hard to guarantee, and you'd have to do just that to keep it legal
Lots of misinformation on the internet wrt this, and I am not a lawyer either.
It's especially tragic because Google serves you countless factually incorrect articles if you search for gdpr, which doesn't help with this endless amount of confusion.
You might be interested to know that an IP address isn't actually PII, because that's a concept of California privacy regulation and they don't care about them
It's a different story for gdprs personal data however. Because there are individuals with static IPs - which makes it possible to link these IP addresses to individuals.
If you could only omit these, you could technically use ipadresses however you want too. But I admit that that's kinda unrealistic ( • ‿ • )
The other elephant is that while everyone has analytics, only one in five companies pays someone with an actual clue how to interpret them to look at them regularly, and only one in five of those companies has a decision making structure that allows them to act meaningfully in response to insights gained.
Yea, companies are so used to laissez faire that when they're finally told "too bad, so sad" they throw a tantrum, sue, cry, and eventually comply as maliciously as the possibly can, to show the world how upset they are that they can't simply do whatever they want.
> Part of the problem is that the law didn't seek to distinguish between tame first-party tokens and the really naughty third-party tokens
Maybe I'm an outlier, but ideally I don't want them collecting any "tokens" without my consent. I don't care if they're first party or third party or birthday party. I should be able to browse web sites in peace without some company collecting anything. If the web site doesn't work exactly the way I'd expect because I did not provide that consent, then that's on me.
Well that's a thought everyone can identify with, but objectively
speaking, they're paying with their energy to build the website, and
paying their money to host it. Yet you would want to browse it for no
cost at all.
You're framing website use as transactional but for financial transactions we literally require informed consent.
Also you seem to be operating under the assumption that your personal data is something that can be used as payment. The GDPR literally does not allow that just as human rights don't allow committing yourself to indentured servitude. You can't sign away your rights. If you share personal data you continue to have rights to that data and can revoke your consent. It doesn't stop being your data just because you handed it over, even if you did so willingly.
If your business model can't work without exploiting your users' personal data, your business model no longer works and it's your job to find a new business model that does. There are plenty of business models that only worked when indentured servitude was legal (let's not have the debate about prison labor in the US) and I'm sure you would agree that it's fine for those business models to no longer work. It's part of the risk of doing business. Innovate. Disrupt. Or perish.
> you don't need a banner even of you do track users for anybody with DNT
This is not true. The specific text of the law requires that websites have to provide details about their cookies, and then document and store user preferences.
If you just honored the DNT, you would still be out of compliance.
> and there's now an industry dominated by a small handful of players (Osano vs OneTrust)
Because of that there are now neat categories of cookies / cookie purposes.
Would be nice if we could select one time in our browser “necessary cookies only”, and that would be communicated to every website visited, without the need for a banner. But that’s user friendly and that’s anathema to the modern web :)
> 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.
It does, or rather the law doesn't state cookies at all. It has nothing to do with cookies.
All the law says is you require informed consent if you want to harvest personal data and use it for tracking. Cookies are a common way to do that. But cookies used for session and whatnot are exempt, because they're not used for tracking.
The problem is companies are maliciously compliant.
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.
This seems like the best way to go. Companies should have to respect "do not track" and browsers should have to enforce it to the extent that it is technically possible. And "do not track" should be per-domain at least.
And I blame the EU for not making this the law. Just force everyone to adhere to the setting and be done with it. But no, instead we got this bullshit.
Well yeah because the "naughty things" are totally allowed. Can you blame them for trying to make money legally, and most people would say fairly morally (most people in the real world; not on HN).
I think 90% of the blame lies with the EU. They had experience from the cookie law that this would happen.
It like... say you would rather people didn't drink alcohol in pubs (because of all the scary violence it leads to). You can
1. Ban alcohol in pubs.
2. Allow alcohol in pubs.
3. Allow alcohol in pubs but only if people recite the lord's prayer before every purchase.
3. is obviously a dumb choice, yet it's the one they chose.
Sure, and that's a perfectly reasonable law. There's no "oh you actually can sell alcohol after 10pm as long as your customers fill in a 5 page form, which is what the EU has caused.
Scummy companies won't magically disappear or stop scummy practices. We can and should blame them, but it's pretty much obvious that the legislation (despite good intents!) resulted in a de-facto shitshow that failed to recognize basic social/behavior sciences, technical details, or anything else.
It should've been an user-agent centered feature rather than individual website gimmick - that's the only way it could've possibly worked. After that, companies can try to continue doing whatever shit they want to try, but none of their identifiers would be persisted unless user agent allows it. (This does not account for fingerprinting, but that's a whole other story.)
Instead, legislators made some weird decisions that failed to account for human and corporate nature (greed), and we ended up with more popups and banners than ever.
How? I fail to understand why if a browser, configured to not persist anything by default (without a consent) would persist anything. Save for a bug, of course.
> It's like piracy, there's only so much you can do plugging holes
I say keep on plugging. When you make a law and bad actors find loopholes, the solution isn't to throw up your hands and say "Well, we tried!" The solution is to continuously refine the law as loopholes are found. Laws should get regular patch releases.
Yes that seems to standard practice in modern government. Impose a series of ineffective rules that do more harm on the public than helps them, and when it fails just invent new ones without considering why the last one failed. And most importantly don't get rid of the previous rules, just let them stick around a decade after it's been apparent they were ineffective.
Instead of requiring companies to put up a banner if they did certain tracking activities via cookies the law should have simply outright banned the tracking activities entirely.
How can the banners be necessary because of “naughty things” when the banners do absolutely nothing to mitigate those things in any way? All those things are still happening AND people have to waste time clicking useless banners.
I hope you'll be glad to know that this law already hits companies where it hurts, because many people will close the tab after the slightest annoyance.
I hope you're happy that this law already encourages people to stay within a few big websites (where they've already clicked away the cookie banner) and not explore anything new (where they'd have to click away a cookie banner every time).
Or, crazy idea, don't have invasive user-tracking cookies? Github doesn't even have a cookie banner and they're one of the largest websites on the planet.
After seeing websites pull shit like "legitimate interest" where they share data with 9 trillion of their "partners", they can all rot for all I care.
All you can get this way is that you'll still have temporary cookies,
removed after closing the tab, you will still have the banner, but this
time the banner will popup each time you'll enter the website, because
there's no cookie that will tell the banner that it has already been
displayed.
I have it like this. But with that, I'm using a banner autoclicker. So
the company gets my data, although different each time I enter the
website, and I don't see any banners. Win/win?
This is it. This isn't the EU's fault and the post isn't quantifying the benefit of requiring explicit consent in these banners. It's all about efficiency and productivity as if it's all that matters in the world. It doesn't care about users' right to privacy or their right to control their own data.
This is an example of the potential double-edged sword of passing legislation without input from lobbyists. On one hand, without an industry voice, they passed an amazingly ambitious set of protections. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like there was a technical industry expert who warned them of the implications.
(I say that, but the EU bureaucrats that passed this law may actually see the immense numbers of popups as a win still - who knows).
A revision is patently obvious to seemingly everyone - revise the law to instead mandate that websites respect the Do Not Track header, or at least have designed a more granular replacement. There's no reason you shouldn't just be able to set it once and your browser tracks it for you.
I would like to present my opinion that this amount of time is spent dealing with website malicious compliance with EU rules. And it is in general asking people to get tracked and present them with personalized track or share/sell the data to their partners. All of these does not happen and you don't have to do that if you don't track and collect information about your users. Well there are some genuine websites that needs that but I am talking about the general case.
They do already, and big companies have already been fined for not offering them, which led to some smaller parties adding them. See here [0] for a list, amongst which was Microsoft getting a $65 million fine for not having an easy opt-out on Bing, or $162 million to Google for the same thing. Noncompliance should be reported.
On #1, yeah, you can. But don't expect the site to respect the EU laws.
I'm all for the hostile corporation to hostilize themselves into complete inaccessibility too. Let them build their castle, with a moat, and not let anyone near them. But unfortunately, they are still smarter than that.
(But anyway, they seem to be getting dumber by the minute, so there's still hope.)
I don't even have the words to express how little I care if companies serve me targeted ads with cookies. On the other hand I absolutely despise what the average visit to website with a cookie banner has become.
Blame the companies, not the regulations. A significant part of their reasoning behind byzantine stalking permissions banners is that they are deliberately inconveniencing people like you who don't care, so you can be weaponised against those of us who do in discussions about the regulations and related privacy matters.
I can't believe any of this made a difference in privacy. There is ZERO chance that the law can be enforced here. I've worked in few startups in Europe, no one understand their obligation, let alone the consequences from third party services.
This whole cookie banners, and GDPR in general, is as good as literature.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadCookies should be enforced in the browser. I think all the major browsers block third party cookies now. Bad actors can use other fingerprints to do tracking.
One would hope so. Google cancelled the plans https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-scraps-plan-remove...
Blocking 3rd party cookies has no impact. Everyone and their cousin can technically track you with first party cookies.
No "cookie banner" is required UNLESS you are using cookies to track me or personally idetify me.... in which case, you must ask my explicit consent to do so.
Blame the parasitic adtech industry wanting trade your personal data. Not the EU for providing you with consumer protection.
Blame them for what? We all understand that personal information is the currency that pays for these services. While we may not love that we have to pay (who does?), we accept it as a fair trade. Until governments get their ass in gear to make paying with more favourable currencies viable, that is going to remain, now just with extra clicks.
> Not the EU for providing you with consumer protection.
I guess a bandaid is better than nothing, but we'd be better off if the EU would tackle the real issue. Going there would ruffle some real feathers, though, so good luck. But if there is blame to go around, it is on the EU for being too afraid to ruffle them.
For it to be a fair trade, you must fairly ask permission for my personal data! That is the very essence of the GDPR!
But that's where the GDPR has left things, thinking the problem is with the vendor, when in reality the problem is with the consumer spending beyond their means. Fair enough that the consumer needs protection from themselves, but, when it is a spending problem, why does that not come in the form of legal mandates over how one's wallet is used?
Of course, this would be improved in a much better way if, again, governments would actually tackle the real problem.
What are the services? Leave out sites where you pay for something with money, or banks, or subscription sites. Those often have tracking too, but they could exist without it. What services are the free ones providing?
News is a special case, paying for journalism is a problem. Other than that:
* Videos and images
* Forums and blogs
* Databases like IMDB
* Random bits of information you want once in your life
I'm struck by how the presence of any amount of website design makes all these things worse. It's not only too easy for them to get our data, it's too hard for us to get their data, because the presentation and theatrical impression of being a service is all self-aggrandizing and works to delay and capture users for more tracking and ads. All we really want is servers, not services.
If somehow storage and processing was paid for by magical pixies, and available as a utilitarian series of gray bulletin boards with identical design, that would be much better than all the bloated sites that track visitors. It's wrong to portray this as a bargain in which we respect and appreciate some sort of service, and therefore ought to pay for it, because there is no service. They're not being paid for providing something wonderful, they're being paid for having got there first and for being well-known, or promoting themselves.
> 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 cookie banners on your website? Don't store PII in cookies. You know the best way of not having to care about GDPR? Don't store PII.
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 not having to care about GDPR? Don't store PII
This is a nothing to hide argument [1]. Proving compliance with GDPR is tedious and expensive even if you’re fully compliant. (Proving no jurisdiction is easier.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
It was predictable that ultimately people would blame the regulation instead of the companies? Not sure I understand what you mean, and even if you meant what I think you meant, not sure what the point is? People blame all sorts of things all the time...
Edit since you've added more to your comment
> Proving compliance with GDPR is tedious
That's my point. No need to prove compliance if GDPR doesn't apply.
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.
"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...
I've worked with two firms that have faced GDPR complaints. It's "up to", not "immediately on your first offence".
It's not specifically GDPR - it's the degree of overregulation in every sector, for almost every aspect of doing business. I was also speaking facetiously about large companies in particular - for example, just 12 hours ago, Facebook got hit with another $700 million fine. You don't have to be Facebook for the chilling effect. Or, the EU's stuff with Apple, the $12 billion fine against the will of Ireland, which has Apple assessing the profitability of even being in Europe.
This one?
"The EU fined online giant Meta almost 800 million euros on Thursday for breaching antitrust rules by giving users of its Facebook social network automatic access to classified ads service Facebook Marketplace." - https://fortune.com/europe/2024/11/14/eu-fines-meta-840-mill...
Because if so, that's going to have the opposite of a chilling effect, as it is anti-trust.
Likewise, what Apple got with Ireland, while Apple has to pay, it's something Ireland did wrong by illegally giving Apple a tax dodge to encourage it to base itself in Ireland rather than anywhere else in Europe — if that's "chilling": good. We don't want tax-dodgers. If Apple can't be profitable in Europe without dodging taxes, something's gone very badly wrong for them.
Now, I'm not saying the EU doesn't over-regulate, as that kind of claim about any government is like saying that a software project contains zero functions that are never invoked by a user. But I am saying the scope of your rhetoric is not sufficiently supported by the evidence provided.
It was predictable this would result in disclosure/consent spam.
> No need to prove compliance if GDPR doesn't apply
If you are in the EU, GDPR applies. It may not be relevant. But you’re subject to it and its regulatory arms. (And if you have a competitor in the EU, it’s known practice you can waste time and money with requests and complaints.)
Both laws’ aims are noble. But they require tweaks. Starting with the cookie banners would be smart.
I think you might be missing that I'm talking about this from the companies perspective, not from the perspective of a person inside EU.
If the company doesn't store any "personal data", GDPR has nothing to do with it. It's strictly about "personal data" as defined here: https://gdpr.eu/article-4-definitions/
> (And if you have a competitor in the EU, it’s known practice you can waste time and money with requests and complaints.)
Happen to have any quotes/sources for this? Would be the first time I've come across it myself. I'm genuinely interested in if it's being misused like that.
You’re still obligated to respond to requests, even if it’s no response. And data regulators will still follow up on groundless complaints.
DMCA is strictly about copyright violation. If you’re not violating copyrights it should have nothing to do with you. But that isn’t how things play out in reality.
> have any quotes/sources for this?
No, just anecdotal. Every Magic Circle firm, however, will happily file complaints in multiple jurisdictions for you.
I’ll admit I’ve used GDPR a touch vindictively after a customer service interaction went poorly. Lots of requests, wait for a minor fuck-up, escalate to multiple data regulators because I technically have multiple nexuses. European equivalent of copying your state AG on a letter, except the burden to respond is on the company.
I don’t know if after that it saw more natural usage but I doubt it.
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?
Replace marijuana with "personal data" and imagine it is about websites with visitors within EU. If they're not storing, processing and/or transmitting personal data, there is no compliance requirements (from GDPR at least).
This is a good analogy. By making the marijuana illegal, you also implicitly widen search powers. You can’t arrest someone you think smells like weed if weed is legal. (Or answer a neighbor’s complaint that they suspect they’re growing weed.)
Same idea. If you say you aren’t storing personal data and I say you are, someone’s got the authority to check. Those checks and confirmations cost time and money. With a complain-investigate set-up like GDPR (and American securities law), the burden is on the respondent.
Nope, you don't. Those are two different things.
There are plenty of things that are made illegal without giving the government the power to search for them.
> You can’t arrest someone you think smells like weed if weed is legal.
You can't arrest someone by smelling like weed in any democracy where it's illegal either.
> You can't arrest someone by smelling like weed in any democracy where it's illegal either.
isn't true. Sweden is super strict on usage and if even a "normal" person and/or neighbour would smell weed from you or your place they'd definitely call the cops on you. If a cop smelled weed on you in public you'd get arrested immediately no doubt.
Yet, most people consider Sweden a democracy :)
If some random policeman can look at you, decide to arrest you with no real evidence, and it's all legal, that a huge Human Rights violation right there.
How does a judge deal with this? Do they rush to smell the culprit too?
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 click through - just like all of California's Prop65 warnings are ignored today.
> Don't store PII.
These hard-line statements defy reality. Many websites have legitimate need to store PII.
> You know the best way of not having to care about GDPR?
Don't be in the EU?
Just ignore it. There are no consequences. If you don't have physical presence within the EU - there's little-to-zero the EU can do about it. The EU can think it's laws apply to the world all it wants - but the world disagrees.
"Essential Cookies" do not need a consent banner.
Case in point: Hacker News is 100% compliant AFAIK and has no banner.
> Many websites have legitimate need to store PII.
If there is actual legitimate interest or legal requirements, such as collecting an address for delivering a package or performing fraud-prevention, there is also no need for cookie banners.
Or, more common for ecommerce, "transferred" into an advertising algorithm so the business can gain more similar customers. Oh the horror!
If so, it is legitimate interest to do fraud prevention, so there's no need for a consent banner, first or third-party. Naturally you can't go and use this data for a purpose that has no basis under legitimate interest.
Another example: Cloudflare is running DDoS prevention under our noses here at HN, for example, but there's no need to ask for consent, even though Cloudflare is a third-party. Why? Because this is considered legitimate interest.
> Or, more common for ecommerce, "transferred" into an advertising algorithm so the business can gain more similar customers
For this you do need consent, if you transfer PII. If you don't want a banner you can replace it with a simple checkbox during the checkout process. Not only less hostile, but also more transparent than a banner.
To understand how customer's shop on my website. Heatmaps, view port, device type, screen resolution, frequency of browsing, where their mouse hovers the most, page dwell time, etc.
These are impossible tasks for most website operators to do themselves.
> For this you do need consent, if you transfer PII. If you don't want a banner you can replace it with a simple checkbox during the checkout process. Not only less hostile, but also more transparent than a banner.
Or... you can just ignore the EU because the EU doesn't matter. You know, like I originally asserted?
> If you don't want a banner you can replace it with a simple checkbox during the checkout process
This is the sort of mindset that crafted this poorly designed regulation in the first place. Most website operators are not going to willingly add a barrier at the final step of a conversion.
If you are going to use my property and resources - it's my rules or don't come. Pretty simple...
As for the rest, it's quite inflammatory and I don't know how it relates to my comment, so I'll refrain from answering.
Well, except for all the people in the eu. I'm pretty sure the eu does get to tell those people to do or not do things, online or not.
Sounds like information that is not personally identifying - if handled well.
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.
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.
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
The EU designed these regulations to be viral and compel the world into compliance. The world does not need to comply, and largely does not. Multinational corporations with physical presence within the EU need to comply - but nobody else does, nor should they.
> read the directives and implementations yourself, then get back to me.
So we're arguing this down-thread of an article claiming our fuzzy European friends wasted nearly 600,000,000 hours last year clicking "I Accept" over and over? Seems like a well-designed regulation that's totally working super-duper well for the EU. Totally cut down on cookies!
I think reasonable people can disagree about this, and if enough reasonable people think that a web site operator should not have that "right" then they should be able to pass legislation to curtail it.
As a user, I say I should have the right to control what data is collected by what company, and what they should be allowed to do with it. I should be empowered to decide what kind of data is "essential" for a company to collect about me, not the company. Reasonable people could disagree with me, too. These are not laws of physics.
Somehow people think visiting someone else's private website grants them privileges to be entirely anonymous - it does not anymore so than shopping in a physical retail store.
If we keep going down this path, websites will require a full ToS/EULA just to access the site...
This can be done without a cookie banner, as long as no PII is collected for the purposes of that analysis.
Sure, physical stores can do that in certain way, certainly they cannot reverse pickpocket GPS trackers into our pockets or stalk us around the city. You can ask your customers how they found about your store but they can lie or simply not answer. Cameras in the store? Fine. Cameras in the store bathroom? Not ok.
It is a legitimate interest to understand where your customers are coming from and this can be done without cookies in an anonymous fashion. Similarly, you can understand what people purchase together in an anonymous fashion. Cookies and PII aren't needed for any of this.
Cookies and PII are only necessary when you are trying to surreptitiously correlate people's purchase pattern with something that you shouldn't legitimately know like their sexuality or any given aspect of their identity.
> Lastly - the EU and it's laws don't matter. What are they going to do about non-compliant foreign websites? Nothing.
Rightly so. But if your third party processor is operating in the EU they will hold them liable for processing the data on EU citizens you send them without consent. That is between the EU and your provider.
I hear this a lot. As an American that hosts casual personal websites, I can't help but worry that I'm in violation of the GDPR.
For example, my router logs connections for debugging. And my NGinx server maintains server logs for debugging.
These contain IP addresses. I'm pretty sure those are considered PII under GDPR. And there are a lot of things I think that follow from that, things I haven't bothered to look into or implement. Like whatever policies, disclaimers, notifications, request handling processes, etc. that need to be in place to gather those logs.
Whether or not I need a registered agent in the EU to host my website seems to be rather fuzzy too. It seems to come down to how "sensitive" the data I store in my logs are?
Its also not clear to me whether my home router is subject to GDPR if it receives and logs a packet that was sent to it by an EU citizen, regardless of whether there was a public internet service hosted on that router or not.
I mostly choose to not think about these things - but that nagging concern that my entire self-hosted digital presence violates European law does linger.
GDPR is intentionally obfuscated and made scary by people who have an interest in others thinking the regulation is onerous and silly (so that it is eventually changed/removed).
The regulation is not very hard to read, I would recommend you do it if you haven’t and boils down to: “don’t pass on (process) information without informed consent, if someone requests that you remove their account you should do so- and also don’t keep records around, and do your best not to let anyone access personal information”, the last one is technically unenforceable, but exists to prevent people leaving open access to data processors and bypassing consent more than anything else. A secondary benefit is that people take access controls a little more seriously by forcing breach disclosures.
Even the cookie banners are not needed unless you’re setting cookies for data collection, especially for third-parties!
There is a distinct irony in that all the online simplifications (“gdpr for dummies”, “the 7 things to comply with for gdpr”) are misleading and harder to read than the actual text of the regulation.
EDIT; I was foolish to post this during the peak time for US people. It feels like the Americans want the GDPR to be perceived as a pain.
Section 49 gives, additionally, specific carve outs for logging even if they were a commercial entity.
Consent is needed to pass logging data to third parties or to process it beyond end user functionality.
Its easier to just read the regulation: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj
Unless traffic volume causes truncation, turns out I’m not compliant!
It could be that you are running ads and your ad provider is a processor in the EU and because they cannot handle jurisdictional consent well they attempt to pawn that off onto you in your terms and conditions. EU law has already decided that they cannot turn a blind eye however, if you aren't collecting consent then your processor has to assume that consent isn't given.
So yeah, worry about your contracts with third parties that might try to sneak in liability transfers and how your own jurisdiction would deal with that. If your provider is transferring that kind of liability maybe they are trying to also make you liable in the case that their ad installs a virus, so I hope you are already aware of such third party liability transfers in your contracts if your jurisdiction allows for such things.
This type of downvoting on HN is getting silly and needs to stop.
(And a thanks to those who did respond to OP with the advice he is not in GDPR violation. Frankly, a worrying number of HN readers are clueless about legislation that directly affects them, whether they like it or not.)
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...
Obviously it would be better if adblocking wasn't required in the first place.
That's not true. On average any overhead in browsing performance introduced by ad blocking is compensated by the elimination of tracking and ads elements of the pages. It saves bandwidth and are better for UX. We can argue about business models but claiming it requires tremendous resources is not true.
And content-based ad blocking still works in chrome but in much more limited capability compared to superior browser like Firefox.
I don't have the evidence with me, but from what I've seen content-based blocking actually saves resources, both load times and memory. It's because Ads are not actually free or even cheap, you have to make a third-party request, load some content and JavaScript. So, if you spend a little to find and block those requests, you end up saving resources on average.
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.
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…
(f) processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj#006.001
[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-79-gdpr/
Let’s team up the pissed off individuals and raid-sue one of the obviously abusing. One is nothing, but that could at least make more visibility of the borderline legality. And at best we win and go to the next one.
Any law-worker?
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.
It's not complex. There are complex things but understanding the cause of business doing business is not complex. It's simple.
And it’s not really complexity, it’s deliberate choices being made.
The internet used to be run by technologists.
Now it’s run by project managers and web monkeys
Also, most tracking used to use cookies but if that becomes illegal there’s others ways.
By this I mean the law is what it is but the implementation is deliberately hurting the visitors in the hope that they will click "yeah sure whatever" to be let through to the content. The harm does not come from the legislation but is deliberately anti-user by the web site owner. (Fine, in some cases it might be out of the box and merely lazy.)
Which works on Chrome, Firefox and iOS.
The best part is that you can actually specify your preferences, but globally for all websites. I actually prefer to have the functionality cookies enabled.
Yes. Not sure when they added the loginwall, but it was relatively recently, compared to my birth.
GDPR is basically exactly what Bill Gurley talks about here ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM
Regulatory capture.
In general: Southern+Central EU wants to build a new USA. Northern states meanwhile want to reduce the power of the EU. A common market is really the only thing we want.
UK had enough and quit.
As someone from the north (specifically Sweden) who now lives in the south (specifically Spain), I'm not sure there is majority in either places, either directions, to state this with confidence. Lots of swedes are happy with EU and wants to make it stronger, and lots of Spaniards who had enough of EU and wants it weaker.
Maybe it looks differently in the center/eastern parts, haven't spent much time there admittedly.
Regulation exists in the real world, not in some fantasy land where companies do what you want.
Not if it comes from "consumer protection", as opposed to "your computer, your rules."
Treading down the latter too far leads into weird realms like "Hacking? I didn't make your computer do X, I simply sent it messages, it's your fault for not controlling its behavior."
>if you collect users data
>you must ask first
>add a yes or no button on a banner so they can pick
but instead the eu citizens were let down by the legislators
French law for example specifically says that any implementation must "allow the user to refuse the deposit of cookies as easily as to accept it." [1]
[1] https://www.termsfeed.com/blog/cookie-consent-decline-reject...
Whatever you see in cookie banners is either malicious compliance or directly illegal (and already being prosecuted and resulting in fines).
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 because we see they've asked us not to! It's possibly a bit easier for us because we work primarily in the non-profit sector where ethics are perhaps a little higher up the agenda.
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.
I'm sorry, but if we are really so worried about businesses failing that we can't restore some amount of sanity, then something is wrong with society.
https://consentomatic.au.dk/
If you don't want a website doing something on your computer, you start with the browser, not the website.
Because if they can say "hey look over there, regulation bad"; they can escape regulation if it is repealed
2. It was intended to be a way to communicate an actual intent from the user. Once it was set by default, it ceased to be an indicator of user intent.
This presumes that it isn’t the default user position. There are three people on the planet who actually want ad tracking, and they’re welcome to go change the setting, but default off was the correct setting.
The GDPR and ePrivacy directive aren't just about cookies. They limit what a company can do with your data in general, who can access it and how long. Cookie banners are just a downstream consequence of it and the reason they're bad is that most companies try to be clever and design them maliciously in ways to coerce you into "opting in" even though this makes them non-compliant.
If DPAs were serious about enforcing the law, every single website not giving at least equal visual weight to the "refuse all and continue" button (or hiding it behind other options or using individual "legitimate interest" toggle buttons to sneak in their partners despite the existence of the toggle button invalidating the claim of "legitimate interest") would be punished with the maximum fine because they have purposefully and maliciously violated the law.
On the contrary; data protection law was written precisely by those who understand tech and the dangers of companies using it to gather and share your personal data.
It's utterly bizarre people get annoyed for being asked explicit, opt-in consent to gather and share personal data on a case by case basis (as the law demands!), rather than get annoyed at the scummy SV adtech surveillance capitalists for seeking to share your data without consent.
(Once again, "cookie banners" are not required if you aren't tracking me or gathering personal data. Case in point, Hacker News sets cookies and is entirely compliant with no need to ask any permissions from me)
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.
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)
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.
No? At least not in the scale that would require these consent services. Services like member management are literally required to operate the website so those can go into the privacy policy (as would e.g. hosting on AWS or using a CDN).
The reason these consent services exist is that a lot of websites are just content mills that operate entire on behavioral advertising, whether it's the web version of a newspaper or just SEO blog spam. These often use hundreds of "partners" for analytics, ads, targeting, re-targeting, etc. And they desperately try to trick visitors into opting into those.
For your run of the mill Wordpress website you can just get a plugin like https://devowl.io/wordpress-real-cookie-banner/ - and in many cases the free version is good enough.
The things they're calling legitimate use just isn't, which is why they need banners.
Funny example: If they chose not to accept your spying cookies you get to set a cookie to store that choice.
Do targeted ads increase the amount of personal data that needs to be stored and processed and the number of entities that will access it? Yes they do. Are they required for the site to serve its stated purpose? No, unless the site is marketing itself as literally a curated stream of targeted ads. So they require informed and revokable consent (i.e. opt-in). Even if you think they're beneficial to the user.
It's not about what's beneficial. It's about what's required. That's why most sites try to group services by categories like "functional", "analytics", etc. If you want to embed a Google Maps view to help people find your physical store, that's beneficial but still requires consent because it shares their data with a third party (i.e. Google) when the browser loads that map. Of course in this case you don't even need a banner, you could just have a placeholder (often called "content blocker") instead of the map with the option to consent to loading the map and storing that decision so the user doesn't have to see the placeholder again.
There are some analytics companies out there that advertise cookieless analytics, but they are either a) too simple for enterprise or b) a much, much worse privacy and compliance risk.
It's admittedly sound advice to create a banner for such a usecase however, as sanitizing all user data from these events is hard to guarantee, and you'd have to do just that to keep it legal
Many times, the user IP, which is considered PII, is stored in various servers/routers log that you have no access to...
It's especially tragic because Google serves you countless factually incorrect articles if you search for gdpr, which doesn't help with this endless amount of confusion.
You might be interested to know that an IP address isn't actually PII, because that's a concept of California privacy regulation and they don't care about them
https://techgdpr.com/blog/difference-between-pii-and-persona...
It's a different story for gdprs personal data however. Because there are individuals with static IPs - which makes it possible to link these IP addresses to individuals. If you could only omit these, you could technically use ipadresses however you want too. But I admit that that's kinda unrealistic ( • ‿ • )
When it comes to processing other people's data you don't get to do whatever you want.
Maybe try running a website without analytics before throwing a tantrum.
The cookie banner is required depending on the purpose of the cookies, not the party setting them.
Maybe I'm an outlier, but ideally I don't want them collecting any "tokens" without my consent. I don't care if they're first party or third party or birthday party. I should be able to browse web sites in peace without some company collecting anything. If the web site doesn't work exactly the way I'd expect because I did not provide that consent, then that's on me.
How to resolve this?
Also you seem to be operating under the assumption that your personal data is something that can be used as payment. The GDPR literally does not allow that just as human rights don't allow committing yourself to indentured servitude. You can't sign away your rights. If you share personal data you continue to have rights to that data and can revoke your consent. It doesn't stop being your data just because you handed it over, even if you did so willingly.
If your business model can't work without exploiting your users' personal data, your business model no longer works and it's your job to find a new business model that does. There are plenty of business models that only worked when indentured servitude was legal (let's not have the debate about prison labor in the US) and I'm sure you would agree that it's fine for those business models to no longer work. It's part of the risk of doing business. Innovate. Disrupt. Or perish.
If you use cookies for auth, no need to disclail it.
Better, you don't need a banner even of you do track users for anybody with DNT. So you can offer a seamless experience.
They just don't care.
This is not true. The specific text of the law requires that websites have to provide details about their cookies, and then document and store user preferences.
If you just honored the DNT, you would still be out of compliance.
Because of that there are now neat categories of cookies / cookie purposes.
Would be nice if we could select one time in our browser “necessary cookies only”, and that would be communicated to every website visited, without the need for a banner. But that’s user friendly and that’s anathema to the modern web :)
It does, or rather the law doesn't state cookies at all. It has nothing to do with cookies.
All the law says is you require informed consent if you want to harvest personal data and use it for tracking. Cookies are a common way to do that. But cookies used for session and whatnot are exempt, because they're not used for tracking.
The problem is companies are maliciously compliant.
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.
Yay capitalism.
Partly because of laziness, partly because of pessimistic legal compliance.
I think 90% of the blame lies with the EU. They had experience from the cookie law that this would happen.
It like... say you would rather people didn't drink alcohol in pubs (because of all the scary violence it leads to). You can
1. Ban alcohol in pubs.
2. Allow alcohol in pubs.
3. Allow alcohol in pubs but only if people recite the lord's prayer before every purchase.
3. is obviously a dumb choice, yet it's the one they chose.
That's the law here in Scotland. As annoying as it is, the same law doesn't apply in the rest of the UK but it's reasonable.
If you're not, then all you need is a privacy policy somewhere stating that you use cookies and that they are all first party.
That seems fair to me. I like to know if cookies are used or not regardless if they are site or third party only.
It should've been an user-agent centered feature rather than individual website gimmick - that's the only way it could've possibly worked. After that, companies can try to continue doing whatever shit they want to try, but none of their identifiers would be persisted unless user agent allows it. (This does not account for fingerprinting, but that's a whole other story.)
Instead, legislators made some weird decisions that failed to account for human and corporate nature (greed), and we ended up with more popups and banners than ever.
Wrong.
And the GDPR is not just for the web.
How? I fail to understand why if a browser, configured to not persist anything by default (without a consent) would persist anything. Save for a bug, of course.
It's like piracy, there's only so much you can do plugging holes
Cookie banners always felt like a feel-good solution. Made worse by inconsistent UIs, differing button texts, long explanations, etc.
I say keep on plugging. When you make a law and bad actors find loopholes, the solution isn't to throw up your hands and say "Well, we tried!" The solution is to continuously refine the law as loopholes are found. Laws should get regular patch releases.
Instead of requiring companies to put up a banner if they did certain tracking activities via cookies the law should have simply outright banned the tracking activities entirely.
I hope you're happy that this law already encourages people to stay within a few big websites (where they've already clicked away the cookie banner) and not explore anything new (where they'd have to click away a cookie banner every time).
After seeing websites pull shit like "legitimate interest" where they share data with 9 trillion of their "partners", they can all rot for all I care.
If I do not want a website to set any cookies, the correct course of action is to tell my user-agent to not keep any cookies from it.
I have it like this. But with that, I'm using a banner autoclicker. So the company gets my data, although different each time I enter the website, and I don't see any banners. Win/win?
(I say that, but the EU bureaucrats that passed this law may actually see the immense numbers of popups as a win still - who knows).
A revision is patently obvious to seemingly everyone - revise the law to instead mandate that websites respect the Do Not Track header, or at least have designed a more granular replacement. There's no reason you shouldn't just be able to set it once and your browser tracks it for you.
[0] https://www.cookieyes.com/blog/cookie-consent-fines/
1. There are ways to bypass geo-block.
2. People would build alternatives specifically for EU (with few exceptions).
3. They could even offer those alternatives to US, but with better privacy out of the box.
I'm all for the hostile corporation to hostilize themselves into complete inaccessibility too. Let them build their castle, with a moat, and not let anyone near them. But unfortunately, they are still smarter than that.
(But anyway, they seem to be getting dumber by the minute, so there's still hope.)
This whole cookie banners, and GDPR in general, is as good as literature.