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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

In 2018, you need a web browser to view the web. Plus uBlock Origin. Plus I don't care about cookies. A mere web browser respecting web standards to the letter would not suffice.

To publishers: I'm not interested in you tracking me just for reading one text article from your website. Asking me is non-sense. Who the hell wants to customize their "tracking experience". I just want to access the content.

I'm fine if you don't want me to read the article without your tracking stuff. Please block me. But don't ask me. This is creepy and this wastes everyone's time and bandwidth. Go to a street and ask people if they would like to be followed and if they would like to customize this experience. Hell no. I don't want to. Leave me alone.

You may not care about me, but I'm sure I'm not alone. Many people are actually confused and afraid of these questions and run away. I've heard that from several people these last weeks.

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What I don't get, isn't GDPR supposed to make tracking opt-in? While most sites just give you the option to opt-out now! Isn't that a violation of GDPR?

Yeah I am not an expert at all on this, but I believe that you canont ask for consent in order to gain access to a service/content - the consent must be opt-in and must be freely given.

"This means people must be able to refuse consent without detriment .... The GDPR is clear that consent should not be bundled up as a condition of service unless it is necessary for that service"

Source: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...

Makes me a bit annoyed now to have to go through a consent-wall like this - I can only imagine the management pouring over the "consent data" as some sort of new marketing metric about how engaged their audience is etc etc

This does not mean that a company has to offer free access to its contents if you refuse its terms.

Those consent walls are the expected consequence of GDPR.

People are given a real, free choice: Accept and access free contents or navigate away. There is no detriment and this is not a condition of sale.

One can go further and argue that consent is indeed in fact required to provide the service since this is free contents financed by ads.

True, but you dont need to use full-spectrum tracking to serve ads. TV commercials dont use the same level of invasive tracking, yet they finance all sorts of content just fine.

That's quite irrelevant to the GDPR.

If you finance your service through ads then consent is required because that's how your business works and ads are your income.

If you sell books online then indeed consent is not required and you cannot make ordering books subject to consent.

This is expressly the argument the GDPR forbids: The consent that the GDPR allows cannot be in exchange for anything (because then it is not completely free). (Also, this consent is not the only justification you can use under GDPR for tracking, it's just the easiest way to justify the intrusive tracking used by ad networks, because the other ways mean you have to actually describe why it's necessary).

No, the GDPR does not forbid this, as I wrote.

The GDPR does not state that consent cannot be exchanged for anything. The GDPR will look at whether consent is necessary for the performance of a contract and/or provision of service.

So the argument that this is allowed is two-fold:

- this is free content made publicly available: There is no contract or provision of service.

- this content is provided free thanks to ads: Consent is necessary to provide the contents.

The GDPR is not meant to force companies to work for free and it does not force them to.

Don't complain to publishers. Complain to EU lawmakers who make this cookie acknowledge silliness mandatory.

I agree with you. Session cookies do not require consent but settings-related cookies do and this is a bit silly.

But it got worse with GDPR (which I think is good, contrary to the previous law), and I don't care about cookies seems to take care of some of this mess.

edit: but actually I don't set settings on random web pages, therefore they should not need my consent anyway. My consent could be asked the first time I set a setting, this would not be intrusive. So maybe the cookies law was not that bad either.

That’s analogous to saying “don’t complain about the stalkers, complain about the police for requiring stalkers to tell you they’re stalkers”.

Not really. We all know that sites give us cookies, it's the standard behaviour in the net, and the constant nagging by all web sites "accept this" and "accept that" and "continue as usual" has led to a situation where each and every site gives a different warning, which we all then blindly accept, because it is way too cumbersome to actually read pages of legalese when you are arriving on a Web page that has some information you googled for.

I claim that the cookie-acknowledgement legislation does not add value and is clearly counterproductive. We are taught to accept that "everyone is a stalker" and "it's okay we do it, because you accepted it, didn't you read that legal disclaimer, possibly in a language you do not understand".

To my understanding, the legislation requires informed consent not mere assent.

So this would be like, what, pretending you’re a fan to get an autograph and then revealing that the celebrity has just signed away all their rights? And then asserting that that’s legally binding?

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