Google’s new popup will further weaken Facebook’s advertisement business
thebigtech.substack.com
thebigtech.substack.com
I mean, I know that adtech spy on us a lot, but I didn't knew for example that using Bluetooth while the app is shut down was possible.
Makes me very wary even of dumbphones, for example I bought a dumbphone recently, and yet it came with Facebook and Google Assistant both pre-installed.
Unfortunately they went so hard on dumbphone specs that it ran poorly, kept crashing all the time because it kept running out of ram. (it had 256mb of RAM I believe, or 128, don't remember, one of the two).
How did you think for example notifications were pushed to Bluetooth smart watches?
Presumably only Android works like this?
Things like weather (with or without current coarse location), sports scores, headline news benefit from up to the minute data fetches, but older data is still useful.
For communication apps, often people would like notifications on inbound messages, so that can fit with web push apis to get data; but if you don't want notifications, you can't consistently make messages available to read offline.
1) Shortcut on the homescreen by simply tapping 1 button(install) instead of hoping that the user will somehow remember you. WebApp shortcuts are quite involved.
2) Sign in once with a forever session. I hate apps where I need to sign in again because having an App is a great opportunity to have one time sign in that runs through generations of phone upgrades. Even better, the sign in doesn't have to involve the user, the data will be there and not accidentally deleted which means that the presence of the app is as good as username and password.
3) Immersive experience means better user experience. The UI becomes part of the Phone's UI instead of another App's UI's sub UI. A well designed app is very effective. I haven't seen a well designed mobile Web App, Web is great for websites and "possible to do" Mobile Web Apps.
4) Smaller download sizes, faster launches. A website would usually download a few MB of scripts and images, an App without bloated frameworks would be easily around that size and will download it only once. It will be ready to use in less than 0.5s every time.
5) Any advanced stuff is done much better natively even if it is possible to do through the browser. This is because the browser put extra boundaries around the boundaries that has due to the OS boundaries.
Though, (1) is wrong on iPhone; there’s an “add to home screen” action in the share menu.
As I said:
>WebApp shortcuts are quite involved.
Most people don't know about that functionality, you need to teach them. It would have been cool if Apple supported that, then I guess everyone would have been trying trick you into it like the good old days where every website was trying to trick you into making it you start page.
I know the reasoning of that statement but it's not providing an argument to refute. What am I supposed to say? "No. You can't, that's why it's not happening".
1) You can add websites as app icons to iOS and Android. 2) Websites can hold persistent identities, and devices can otherwise remember the login details. 3) Websites UI can be anything and have nearly all options that apps can have, depending on the quality of the UX, which depends on the designer in any case. 4) A professional website will not be any slower if properly designed.
Now on 5, that depends on the specifics of the app. Some types do benefit greatly from being boarded on a device. An example would be Procreate for instance, which can not be mimicked on par in webform.
2) Websites do that through Cookies and Local Storage. These have limits and users would be purging them en mass. The data of the app doesn't disappear for no reason.
3) As I said, the problem is that it runs within a browser if not added to the homescreen. It is a window within a window.
4) Professional or amateur design, websites data is managed by the browser and not you. Caches get invalidated, you download everything again. It happens all the time.
Just being able to do something is not enough, Apps are much smoother experience.
I also cannot bookmark pages from apps. I can, however, add websites to the home-screen. I don't see any reason to download fat binaries for a worse experience.
Are you an app developer? You seem to be very biased.
BTW, I’m not talking about websites(articles and forms) but Web apps(task achieving experiences). Of course it’s just as bad experience to have a website as an app. it’s even worse when you are being forced to.
I’m not sure there’s any explanation other than more ad/data revenue.
Are there apps that give superior experience than web sites nowadays? Even not accounting for privacy, the apps are generally just shittier with less functionality.
I used to give the Google apps as examples of apps being better, but the gmail app is more buggy than just using gmail in a mobile browser, not to mention the integrated phone mail app.
Similar, there’s quite a few chat/video apps and games where apps make sense. And none of them prompted me to download the app or show lies like “better in our app” crap.
The IMDB app is far better (to me) than the dumpster-fire that has become their website. Other than that, I agree with the sentiment that most apps for websites are not worthwhile to install.
I use a text-only browser and write simple command line "apps" (scripts) to retrieve text from sites like IMDB. It works very well. Opening pages on these sites in a "modern" web browser is an entirely different experience. We cannot ignore the complicity of the "modern" web browser in degrading the "user experience" in cases like this one.
Example:
# Don't forget the trailing fwd slash else 302 redirect
echo https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9484998/ | 1.sh 280 > 1.html
firefox ./1.html
case $# in 1);;*)echo "usage: echo URL | $0 size";exec echo size options are 140 210 280;esac;
read x;case $x in https://m.imdb.com/title/*/);;*)exec echo error: URL \(should end with fwd slash\);esac;
x1=$(echo "$x"|cut -d/ -f5);
curl -H"User-Agent" -0 -4o "${x1}" "$x";
(grep -o "<title>.*</title>" "${x1}"|sed 's/ */ /g';
echo "<h3>Image size: $1</h3>";
(exec grep -o "title-cast-item__actor\"[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's>.*href=><a href=\"https://www.imdb.com>;s/?ref.*\"/\"/;s[.*[<p>&</a><\/p>['|nl -s,
exec grep -o "title-cast-item__actor[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's/.*>//;s/.*/<img alt=\"&\"[^\>]\*/'|grep -of /dev/stdin "${x1}" \
|case $1 in ---////////////////////////---IMDb-CAST-PHOTOS-ONLY---\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\---)
;;140)cut -d\" -f1-2,7-8,15|sed 's[.*[<p>&/></p>['
;;210)cut -d ' ' -f1-3,9|sed 's/https:/src=\"&/;s[.*[<p>&\"/></p>['
;;280)cut -d/ -f1-2,18-21|cut -d\" -f1-3,8|sed 's/class=\"/src=\"/;s/\.jpg/&\"/;s/ 280w//;s[.*[<p>&/></p>['
esac|nl -s,;
exec grep -o "title-cast-item__char\"[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's/.*cast-item-characters-link..//;s/.*/<p>\"&\"<\/p>/'|nl -s,;
))|sort -n|cut -d, -f2-
rm "${x1}" 2>/dev/null;Funny, to me the IMDB app is the perfect example of a dumpster-fire app, with every 3rd tap/action resulting in an “invitation” to sign up for an account.
If you can simulate 5 different phones it won`t matter if someone gets their spyware onto one of them.
But it is always better to address the root cause of the problem. This often means a policy or legal issue rather than a technical, but has the advantage of not becoming a whack-a-mole technical race.
I am as cynical about forcing apps down user's throats as anyone (Reddit, I'm looking at you), but the downvotes are a bit too much when this is a perfectly reasonable point, no?
Some cases for apps are perfectly legitimate, maybe the access to the phone APIs and the native experience is much better for a given product or service. I'm a firm believer in PWAs but as it stands I really prefer Uber or delivery apps to be native.
I really hope the people downvoting the parent comment are not the same people who are staunchly against web apps, though I suspect there will be some intersection. We can't have web apps, but we can't have native apps either... What can we have then, Geocities and MySpace?
and it is possible to do it with apps if we shift to apps being a service for the user, rather than a service for the developers sponsors
The expectation is 'everyone wants you to use their app so they can track and advertise better' and the parent basically said 'nuh-uh'. We need more to be able to consider it substantive and benefiting the conversation, IMO.
I can see why GPS based apps, or camera apps with filters, or networking apps 'need' to be installed apps (I don't know if an easy way to do GPS through a browser; speed and fast access to storage) ... but Amazon, Reddit, newspapers, ... what am I gaining?
Genuine question as a one time web dev I've always considered web sites written as an app, shipped with a browser, to be a negative. What am I missing out on?
What a letdown...
> What a letdown...
The original iPhone demo showed the actual desktop version of the NYT website loading in Safari. Websites were the ones that later optimized for mobile.
And I don’t remember iPhones being promoted as giving websites anything approaching native app capabilities except when Apple tried to sell that line to developers before they had a public SDK. Nobody bought it, even then.
Like seriously; compare your comment to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27348626 . You just so happen to be weird: that's all.
For example, I worked on a rich text editor, and we wanted to put a bar with text formatting tools above the touch keyboard. This is not possible in the browser: your webapp cannot measure the keyboard or the remaining available viewport (and the keyboard's size depends on the input method and the iPhone model).
Another example I experienced is when we wanted to have full-screen dialogs with buttons at the bottom. If you do that, then the users have to tap your buttons twice, because the first tap only expands Safari's browser UI, and your buttons near the bottom of the screen only work while that UI is expanded.
I haven't made an app (don't know how!) and I definitely wouldn't add a "download our app or else!" banner/wall, but I've been extremely surprised from the other side of the table to see just how many users seemingly just want an app for an app's sake, even if it's functionally no different from a responsive mobile view.
Freelancers are cheap if you hire from poor countries.
I'm not sure how this reasoning works. Some company making money using your information isn't with intent to hurt an individual, generally speaking. It's rare that such an opportunity even exists.
Just because you don't know how much your data is worth, and may not even know the crime happened, doesn't make it not a crime or not harmful.
Consider voyeurs who take upskirt photos. Even though the victim may never know that data was stolen, it's undeniable that it's an invasion of privacy and often a criminal offence.
They don't take it. The value of your information is either inherent (is all information inherently valuable somehow?) or in how it can be used. There is no information "staked claim" as with a natural resource. If you don't have the infrastructure and relationships, you can't monetize it... similar to natural resources. Maybe there should be an individual "staked claim" (which is what the GDPR mostly does), but arguing as if it's a given because "I should be able to make money and nobody else should" is not compelling. This is why there are so few laws regarding it and there's the inherent quasi-legal issue of tracking someone's "staked claim" without tracking them.
I can get the former largely without the latter. I am concerned when a random app has access to the latter because they feel entitled to collect it by virtue of installation.
Because it’s not actually yours and you didn’t create it. It’s about you which is a critical difference.
If you connect to a web server and it records a standard access log of a timestamp that it received a request from a given IP address, that’s data 100% generated by the server. That’s not “your data” any more than a recording from a surveillance camera at a gas station you frequent is “your video”.
Get put in a filter bubble? Have your government track you for protesting? Get on the wrong side of grey market price discrimination? Have your access to data and websites revoked?
Parties to a transaction that have no power don't come out ahead.
> To the extent that the individual and the marketer's interests are not aligned, the harm is borne entirely by the individual. It doesn't matter if the intention is to harm the individual
Of course it does. That's the claim. Don't bring up tangential subjects and then try to associate them as if it's a rephrasing.
There's a reason both murder and manslaughter are crimes.
I mean, grandma isn't going to figure this out on her own. She is happy to have a way to get in touch with her grandchildren and has no idea she is being exploited.
The Mercer family didn't personally want to kill, imprison, or cripple a bunch of people, but that's certainly what they achieved with their opiod business.
Facebook hurting you might be because they want the money, but they specifically choose to make money by hurting you, and society. [2][3]
So in the end I don't think it is wrong to phrase it that way. Someone beating you up in exchange for money still has the goal of beating you up.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psycholog...
[2]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03007995.2021.1...
[3]: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/social-media-news%20consumpt...
I wonder what fraction
By which you mean Google, Microsoft and Apple?
>Apple, Google & Microsoft Have Teamed up to Block the Right-to-Repair Law
https://wccftech.com/apple-google-microsoft-team-up-to-stop-...
And now that so many of us leave BT on all the time for our BT earbuds and airpods, I'd assume it's become better at tracking, not worse
Whatever the opinion on tracking, Google definitely carves out their own moats and are hypocritical in a lot of respects. Arguably pushing changes to hurt their small competition given they have better/more pervasive personalized tracking without the low hanging fruit.
On modern Android versions, there's some serious limitations on apps running in the background at all. In most cases, if you want your app to run in the background, you gotta put up a notification that is displayed the whole time that background service is running.
Oh and also. Scanning for bluetooth devices is a fairly battery-consuming activity as far as I can tell.
> Makes me very wary even of dumbphones
If you care about it, consider GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone, which run FLOSS and have hardware kill switches for microphone and other things.
In my country all phones must have permission from the government to operate, and the phone manufacturer that need to ask this permission in first place, any phone detected by cell towers that aren't one of them, can be legally banned from the network (not just YOUR phone, but all identical model phones!)
Last time I checked in with the Librem project, the phone was completely unusable as a phone because the power management and in particular the sleep mode wasn't working properly. Sometimes the phone would wake up from sleep, and since the power management was buggy it would blow through the entire battery charge in an hour.
So essentially you'd need a backup phone for your Librem 5 because you never know if it'll be dead when you need to call 911.
How can we teach it to them?
This article's title and narrative makes it sound like Facebook is using bluetooth fingerprinting to geolocate users against their wishes, and that Android's new permission will end that. However reading the text carefully it never actually claims Facebook is currently doing that. Are they or not? Is this article a hypothetical? That seems very disingenuous but also very typical of the kind of stories on privacy and advertising I see online.
Facebook isn't open-source, so it's hard to analyze what the app does, but not impossible, and Facebook is under a lot of scrutiny.
Facebook maybe thought this day would never arrive and could have avoided that by doing their own mobile OS too.
Well, maybe they declared this battle as lost and focused on the next one: VR. Problem is that VR took too long to arrive and death on mobile can kill Facebook?
My understanding is that even the latest version of android phones home your location in real-time. Which google uses itself for ads.
Do you have a source? Google providing a location-based service for Android OS functionality is different from using it for ads.
Seriously wondering what impact this would have on the world other than a positive one?
But I personally agree with you. My world will be better without it.
A Facebook phone probably would give even more critical reception ...
But it's still interesting how they initially were late on mobile, with all the FBML embedded things (Zynga games) not working on mobile and things moving from their "platform" to mobile apps, but I assume for now with WhatsApp, Insta and messenger they "own" a notable amount of mobile screen time. Missing the underlying platform of course gives them "neutrality" that they can be on all OSes (till the privacy enforcements make it harder for them) instead of having to differentiate the Facebook phone from iPhone.
Between wp8 and WM10, they merged the phone team with the regular OS team, and eliminated (or at least gutted) their QA teams, and they decided to target the high end market only. There were no low spec WM10 phones, and there hadn't been many high end buyers anyway, so who was going to buy WM10? And upgrading to WM10, when available, was often a bad experience.
Also, mobile Edge had a nicer renderer than mobile IE, but it was sooooo much worse UX (laggy, slow, navigation buttons went into some sort of button press queue to be resolved seconds later). When you've driven away app developers, ruining the browser isn't a good choice.
So, it's not that you needed more money (although I'm sure it would help), you also need to not abandon the market niche you found in search of an unobtainable, but potentially more lucrative one, and you need to make releases be consistently better each time. (It would also help if one of the big players stumbled, but you can't count on that).
Now, here we are, with extremely powerful Android phones that do little because they don't have a solid software foundation with which to build good software, an iOS has all the high-quality software.
From my vantage point, Google did everything it could to kill off Windows phone. There was the big spat over YouTube, where Google wouldn't write a native YouTube client and banned Microsoft's. Google bought SoftCard (I think?) and subsequently killed off NFC payments for Windows phones. When they bought Waze, they ceased all development for Windows mobile, allowing that application to atrophy.
There were certainly a lot of other reasons Windows mobile had difficulty. Not the least of which is developers didn't want to have to manage apps for yet another platform. It looked to me like Microsoft was making good strides there, nonetheless, with some nice tooling. I don't use more than ten apps with any regularity and there were solutions for each of them on Windows mobile, at least.
But, rather than make its apps available everywhere its users were, Google used its market position to starve a competitor. And it wasn't merely a case of deciding not to build apps for it. They took active actions to try to kill off Windows mobile before it had a chance to grow. I see no reason to believe they wouldn't do it with any other new entry. We're just stuck with a duopoly now.
They just followed Microsoft's formula.
Man, that's a lot of commitment! I gave up when an app I was using for work ended WP8 support and I updated my Lumia 640 to WM10 and wasn't happy with it (Mobile Edge is really terrible, but I already complained), I could give up that app and go back to WP8, but I wasn't willing to live with the notification center bugs in WP8 that were actually fixed in WM10. I still miss live tiles, and the janky photo uploader app I wrote. :(
For now I'm using Square Home with a Samsung Galaxy, mostly because I like the hardware options on Android better. But, with the whole industry shifting to locked down devices much like iPhones, I may very well switch back to iPhone for privacy reasons. I really liked having a viable third option. C'est la vie.
Regarding apps, bear in mind that Google went out of their way to prevent Youtube and their other services from working on Windows Phone, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/aug/15/... . There's nothing that Microsoft could've done to overcome that much of a disadvantage and anti-competitive scrutiny of Google hadn't gotten underway yet.
Also, I had heard Microsoft blocked 3rd party browsers early on, when Mozilla wanted to develop Firefox for WP, that would have been a lot nicer than mobile IE and later Edge, and probably would have run YouTube just fine.
On the dates, I see a RTM date of Nov 2015, and GA of Mar 2016 for WM10; I think the end of QA and the merger of Windows Phone with Windows was actually at the same time, Nov 2014, AFAIK. It's a bit tricky to nail it down, but I think this article, read with hindsight speaks to those changes. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-layoffs-operating-sy...
Ubiquitous computing may be the next step from there. Something like “the world is the computer and you just interact with it”.
It is hard to evaluate VR with just the perception of what we have today and fantasies about how good the tech will be.
Realistically, I feel like there are two near-intractible problems for widescale consumer adoption.
1. The space problem. For some experiences, yeah, you can sit in a chair and wear a helmet, but I'd expect many of the more compelling immersive experiences would involve flailing your arms and moving around. That's a recipe for disaster inside a small apartment without dedicated space-- you're gonna trip on something or break something. I seem to recall some designs for an "omnidirectional treadmill" to keep someone contained while giving them more room to roam, but that's a whole different thing to design and perfect.
2. The motion-sickness problem. I'm not sure if tracking will improve to the point where this isn't the factor it is now, but I'd expect some people are going to always have issues because of an conflicting sensory experiences-- the helmet says you're being blasted into hyperspace, but your stomach and legs say you're standing still.
You can't alt-tab over to HN to browse during loading screens
Even assuming everyone had the hardware, the barrier to use is magnitudes larger than using a mobile device
Personally, I think VR has already plateaued
Ar might be big, but vr is just silly
Facebook owns the most popular messaging app in the world (WhatsApp) and two of the most popular social networks in the world (Facebook, Instagram). Are they really in trouble because of the Android/iOS changes?
They can still do ads without tracking, but would that still be a trillion dollar business?
Both are really high cost, complex, multi-year bets with lots of moving parts and no real hint of consumer adoption/market size until way after the ship's sailed.
In my opinion, as a consumer, they're really on the path to make VR happen and their wrist-based tech and Oculus is very promising. What VR still needs, after all those years since it's been accessible to the general public, is a killer app, and one can only guess why no one has developed it yet.
The only app that I could imagine bringing mainstream appeal would be a Ready Player One Oasis kind of thing (I've only seen movie, not read the book), but seeing and testing all the social vr apps we have now, the Oasis is the most fantasy thing about that universe.
IIRC only a very few use cases exist where such kind of location data is absolutely essential. They’re still gonna get loads of data from other sources, which would be good enough targeting for most advertisers.
If I have to choose only between Facebook and Google, I'd choose Google to have my data.
I feel the same way as you but not because I think one is less evil. Rather, it's because Google brings me much more value in its search engine and productivity suite.
It seems like there are a lot more political activists working at Google. It also seems likely that this will backfire in a spectacular way at some point.
The risk here is politically strategic data leaks of individual user data - not Cambridge Analytica-like situations. Could be blackmail material on a few key people, or perhaps a giant data leak on millions of people from the "enemy side".
The point is that sharing data with Google is just as dangerous.
After all, not skydiving is also dangerous.
It is technically impossible for something like Protonmail to read my emails.
This feature does not exist with most other email providers e.g. Gmail.
Even if we drop the activist threat model there is still the possibility of external hacking.
Possibly organized crime. I heard of one Yandex employee caught selling access to Yandex users email accounts.
Maybe something similar could happen?
I do not know which internal systems Google or related companies have to prevent employees from accessing user data.
Does anyone here have resources on this topic?
"Political activists" is just one (rather unlikely) insider threat among many that a company like Google has to mitigate.
People are still using Facebook, posting pictures, tagging people they know, checking into locations, posting what they buy and so on.
Still pently of information to track and sell to advertisers.
This is a win win for Google, slow down competition and give the illusion of privacy to users.
Anyway, if you post an image to Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, the EXIF data has your location, or it can be solved from the content of the image.
Which I wish they did...
I don't know, it's kind of a stupid idea, give Facebook an image and yet the expectation is, they're not supposed to know or understand anything about it?
That seems to be the theme with Facebook, they collect a ton of information that isn't obviously useful. So what do Facebook know that the rest of us don't? Because the engineers at Facebook aren't stupid, they must have a reason for collecting all this stuff. Perhaps it's just in case they might find a use case some day?
Like, even if you only leave your home town once every two years, it might be worth more to facebook on that special occasion than the rest of the time.
The most obvious use, I would think, is to train machine learning model. Not necessarily neural networks, it could be much simpler models. Even if you don't need the data now, it can be useful to store it for later use. Maybe at some point in the future a new model will be able to see patterns that are useful. I think they operate based on the principle that data is a valuable resource, even if not immediately useful. How much data they have about their users is one of their key advantages over smaller players.
In general though, more data about you, such as locations you visit, people you're friends with, activities you do, gives them more understanding of what kind of person you are, which is undoubtedly useful when it comes to try and sell you stuff. For example, think about friends you know really well. Presumably, you have some idea of what kinds of things they would like to buy for themselves. That's because you have a good mental model of what kind of person they are and what they like, what they might be interested in.
Facebook maybe has one big advantage over Google, which is that they are a social network. They can try to influence your tastes based on the idea that you are likely to want to try things that your friends are into. They can subtly or not so subtly show you things your friends are doing with the hope that you will want to try or buy those things too.
I also think there was a big push by these folks to also try to determine when you visited places to show that ads worked.. by getting your location at place X on this day and they showed an ad with 24 hours before for example.
F and G are also into people's "purchase history" / (debit card transactions, loyalty card data) for the same reason aren't I think (?)
I doubt FB is selling location to repo men like other location brokers - but that could change.
Dunno if ICE and other letter agencies buy loca data from F and G.. but like the Verizon thing about people's info is the new oil - gotta remember oil is used to create many more things than just gas. Sprint made more than a few pennies being forced to give up data, and so do others.
Certainly makes marketing dollars well spent when you can prove effectiveness and vice versa.
I am assuming the file browsing permission bypasses any exif stripping - which maybe is why so many apps ask for it it...
If Facebook simply have their app say it won't work without accepting this, then I very, very much doubt that anything but a miniscule number of people would be uninstalling the app.
I saw on some new android phones something called "privacy features" which would mean not giving access to contacts for example. The problem is all apps know you are using this feature and they nag you to turn it off. Whats the point then? How I want the thing to be, "oh, the contacts permission is given but nothing here. Oh well. ". Same for location and SMS and other stuff.
I remember old ios, circa ios 5-6 had app permissions behind a password. I would take family phones and lock down location and contacts behind a password (it couldand inapp purchases prevent access to store and iTunes and browser if I remember) so for giving kids this this would be great.
That has never come to android.
That's actually a good idea. I wonder if any Android distros do this. In theory, it should be possible, but I don't know how tricky it would be to implement.
Yes, that is a good idea. The user could also program in more elaborate filters, e.g. to expose a subset of contacts data, random data instead of the actual data, spoofed locations, etc. Also can be distinguish read-only or read/write, etc. (If the user does not have all of these elaborate options and more, then the app writer might realize what is happening and then might program it to complain if there is nothing there. Also, such options can be helpful for testing purpose as well as for user customizability, too.)
(I don't use the cell phone, but nevertheless such thing like you mentioned can be good idea.)
Thanks, I hate it.
These companies that manipulate population into buying products they don't want or need are the mythical "broken window".
Nobody mention how all this online business contributes to global warming. Factories produce useless products, that need to be stored, delivered, disposed of...
Why would they? These companies are collecting the data the government wants, it's a free service for the government and they only have to ask for the data when they need it.
Because then they won't receive a few million $$ in donation for the next campaign.
Because they're not really in charge anymore.
However, governments (at least some) are trying; GDPR is a step in that direction, but it has ovious associated difficulties have been discussed here in HN for years; California is moving in with similar laws, so there is a trend, but it will take years for it to get anywhere. I'd guess that EU will make "GDPR v2" (however that will be called) with severe restrictions on tracking by 2025 or so.
That's the problem, in my opinion. Users should not be able to consent to third party tracking because if they can, companies will use any dark pattern at their disposal to make them consent. Third party tracking in general should be banned.
That's good progress.
However I agree to you that this isn't enough. Even without dark patterns too many people will click "yes" without understanding and this will live on in some way or another, till we make laws stricter.