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Comment by kevsim | Hacker News Reader

Inevitably when GDPR comes up, there are always HN commenters talking disparagingly about the "nanny state" in Europe. However, I'll take some annoying cookie banners over an ad tech company scanning my face any day of the week. If this was in Europe, they would've gotten hit with a fine of 4% of their revenue.

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Issue with the banners is that my answer is always, "no". Yet, I have to do a lot of work to say, "no" on every single website.

This makes it inconvenient to explore the web at large.

The banners should be opt-in not opt-out, but this is against many of the website owner's current interests - including many news sites. So, I've stopped visiting them.

It's actually illegal to have opt-out GDPR banners, but enforcement so far has been non-existent (two years later!).

When the banner fills the screen, the 'X' is the unconditional opt out.

You would think so, but if you read these notices carefully a lot of them will say by either hit "Accept" or closing this pop-up you are consenting. So by hitting the 'X' you are unconditionally opting in.

Unless your talking about the 'X' to close the tab at which point, yes it is

Start talkin to some lawyers then, be the change you want to see, etc.

For those sites you want to visit anyway it is often sufficient to use an extension like Nuke Anything (on Firefox, don't know if it exists on Blink-based browsers but there is sure to be something) and simply zap the overlay: poof, overlay and everything in its container is gone without agreeing to anything. This also works on sites like Facebook which insist on you logging in by putting a modal popup in front of the page.

uBlock Origin has this built in. Click uBO icon in toolbar, and use either the element zapper (once) or element picker (adds to personal blocklist).

You can also go into the uBO settings in the Filter Lists tab and enable some of the 'Annoyances' filters. Some of them block social media like/follow buttons but others will take care of popups.

The uBlock picker works for elements which have fixed names but a quick look at anything created by e.g. React will show this not to be the case. This leaves the zapper - a newish addition to uBlock - which could be used for this purpose if it were available in the context menu. As of now it isn't so I'll keep on using Nuke Anything, if uBlock does add it (or I submit a PR to do it which gets merged, this is the first time I think of this so...) and it works as well I might start using it. I would miss the gratifying feeling of literally nuking the garbage off my screen though...

"4% of their revenue" sounds like a "cost of doing business" fee.

It's "up to 20M or up to 4%, whichever is greater"

From a quick google search VSBLTY's market cap seems to be under 20M, revenues under 1M. So 20M is much more than "cost of doing business".

> "4% of their revenue" sounds like a "cost of doing business" fee.

Really? Are you sure you're not confusing it with profits?

Isn't 10% of revenue considered a decent profit margin? If a fine eats up half of that, it sounds pretty major (and reasonable) to me!

"These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher." - https://gdpr.eu/fines/

Definitely revenue. The point of the GDPR is to have some teeth when dealing with companies that are large enough to shrug off lesser fines.

I know. I was replying to a comment that suggested it was toothless, so I wondered if the author had mixed revenue and profit.

Paying that penalty is for past offences, in addition to being forced to implement all the required changes to stop future violations. Future noncompliance is a new violation and justifies new, additional fines. Intentional continuing noncompliance with these orders could also be treated as gross violation of data privacy which is a crime, the relevant executives can receive jail time for that.

Also note that it's 4% of worldwide revenue for the whole group of connected companies, not just 4% of their EU subsidiary revenue.

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