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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

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Aardwolf

That's like how the EU Cookie law gives incentive to enable cookies:

Disable cookies? See annoying useless cookie warnings all the time everywhere!

You have to enable cookies to make it remember not to spam you with the warnings

EDIT: and good point in the article, one may wonder how making it easier to request data helps to improve privacy

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No. Cookies required to do something the user asked do not require consent. This is solely on the lazy and/or dishonest webdevs.

See http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm#se...

Before the cookie law websites did not have annoying useless cookie popups though, so it's an unintended consequence

No, it's more the bratty kid on the playground who isn't getting their way, so they're throwing a fit and threatening to take their ball and go home.

Avoiding big fines isn't throwing a fit.

I agree. For all that people say there is nothing to worry about, these are fines that would be levied by foreign governments so a company may not really have insight to how likely it is they will be fined.

It's a lot easier for a government to fine a foreign corp than to fine a local one whose workers are all voters and tax payers.

There's a lot of bratty kids then, most of the articles linked to by hacker news are on sites with cookie warnings for example. Not sure if those are visible in the US, but in the EU they are, and they are very annoying

Most bigger websites and websites hosted in EU did have useless cookie warnings that they didn't need before the GDPR.

Yeah, dude, if I know users are going to not penalize me for this and the government is going to fine me 250k a day for it, I’m going to put it up. That isn’t lazy. That’s just time optimization.

No one’s going to fine me for blanket adding the feature so that’s fine.

You lose money when everyone browsing in incognito/tor/cookie-blocking sessions gets the damned cookie warning every visit, and eventually tires of your site's nagging and goes somewhere else. Or maybe you don't, maybe those users had 17 ad blockers and you don't lose a dime, but it certainly hurts your company's goodwill to have less eyeballs.

If users don't bounce, is that based on short-term or long-term research?

Users don’t behave that way. I don’t care about the incognito dudes. Cookie warnings are so passé that all users have trained themselves to always accept. That’s what my user research shows.

Fears of bounces over cookie warnings are overstated. Users do not care.

If a site I use regularly has an annoying cookie warning, I just use uBlock Origin's element picker to hide it. I wonder how narrow the set of users are who care enough to block cookies but can't easily disable the warning.

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