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Comment by beastman82 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about you but I consider this cookie consent thing to be an example of regulatory overreach and a giant pain in the butt

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yes, annoying as hell, I'd like to know stats on this, who cares about cookies?

I sure as hell don't, my mom and aunts don't, they have a harder time using the web because of this.

It makes everyone a privacy nut job, when most of us don't care.

I don't know anyone who care about cookies, but I know a lot that care about their private information not being sold and ending up causing trouble. People who are in the "elderly" demographic especially do not like when their data end up being sold to call centers focusing on calling old people (in very scummy ways), and in one case they basically had to give up answering the phone because each day they received several calls that tried to sell one type of crap after an other. A few years ago there was an article here on HN from a person who worked such call center, and they straight up describe how they bought information such as that in order to target vulnerable people.

An other person I know had issues of identify thefts and are now quite concerned about their data being thrown around. Once a person has gotten burned they tend to become a bit more concerned about the potential issues of private data just floating around everywhere.

But neither person care about cookies. They don't work with computers or care about web technology. The cookie existence or non-existence is completely irrelevant.

I can see that but it sounds like a long shot, I do get a lot of spam and the "good ones" don't come from cookies, in my case none came from cookies.

Most come from places where you give them your info, like phone number and address.

If you are going to do such a broad requirement, I'd like to see info on this, how many scams are run on cookies? Is the price of adding these cookie walls worth it?

To me this seems to be run on top of privacy nut jobs who don't get the real privacy threats we are facing.

I am much more concerned on broad usage of facial recognition than I am of cookies of recipes my mom reads online.

Now you can't exchange a service for data anymore, this is outlawed now, I don't know if thats good.

If its such a long shot I would be very happy with simpler laws that just address those issue. Let say:

If data a company collects about a person end up being used by scummy call centers or data identity theft, then any victim should have the right to compensation equal to 10x of any monetary losses, and for every 100 victims the legal person responsible at the company that authorized the data collection should get 1 year in prison. No consent needed, no exceptions allowed. Just simple damages and jail time.

Sadly laws are not written like that and companies would not want to exist with such sword hanging above them, so we end up with laws like gdpr that tries to have enough threats to push companies in the right direction, with mixed results.

Yeah, that could have been better.

But the irony is what makes me angry, the government will create such nice laws to protect us from the tyranny of corporations, when governments are collecting all types of data, specially facial recognition, which IMO are way worse than cookies.

Great idea - very poor implementation. Most of us here could have seen this coming and designed a better solution.

Such as? I don't mean to sound facetious, but if we take the intent behind GDPR and the current state of user tracking across the web what changes, at a regulatory level, would you suggest that still fulfills the aims of GDPR that doesn't result in our current situation?

The legislation was long overdue. It's a bit more complex than it ought to be but the intentions are just fine. The issue is that there's a huge number of organisations that prefer not to comply or have every intention to make things intrusive and annoying so that people click "accept" to make it go away.

Google inserts many of those banners due to google analytics or ads being used. Their main intention is to gather more user data and make users provide data. This is NOT a 1:1 match with what site owners will want - which is to have users and some basic analytics.

The cookie banners are hostile and intrusive because they are designed to be so. The hope is that users are trained to click 'yes' to get rid of the annoyance.

The GDPR explicitly states that technical cookies are fine, so most sites wouldn't need any banner except for using google analytics & ads. So use a different analytics and you don't need a banner.

It's not the law, it's the implementation and the oligopoly of and companies pushing this implementation.

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