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Comment by buboard | Hacker News Reader

We already have more than enough cookie popups and "heads up" emails whenever a company changes a comma in their ToS. GDPR is a bureaucratic madness and not something to be imitated.

Want to educate users about privacy? do it with extensive educational campaigns, not by ruining everyone's experience on the web

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What really infuriates me is this: "We respect your privacy, click here".

But the general idea of GDPR is not only to educate. It also aims to give you tools at your disposal to control how and if your data is processed and stored. That is the most remarkable feat of GDPR. To complain that this is "bureaucratic madness" is not a problem with the regulation, it is a problem with your perception of personal data. If you didn't have tools before to enable users to control _their_ personal data, you are the problem and it is definitively good that you now have to invest into making sure you create those tools.

> do it with extensive educational campaigns

And the point of GDPR is to give users the information to let consumers make informed choices and to make companies abide by those choices.

There's no point in 'extensive education' if the consumer is still powerless to exercise that knowledge.

It's not GDPR's fault that websites have awful user experience. If they really cared about privacy then they wouldn't use popups that required multiple clicks to remove tracking cookies.

If you have to untick boxes they're not in compliance with GDPR. If the button to not have tracking is gray and "accept all" is green, you're not in compliance. Many websites deliberately try to make it harder to opt-out, which is directly against the GDPR.

GDPR wants to ensure that user privacy is protected. If you do that in your business, you don't need to show any cookie popups.

A honest cookie popup would ask "Do you want to be tracked for advertising purposes? yes/no", and any sane person would klick "no". No education needed at all, if the advertisement industry would play honest.

If the Web experience is ruined now, the Web advertisement industry needs to fix it.

Cookie popups are not caused by GDPR.

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