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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

In Germany it has been illegal for years to embed anything from social media. "Share on..." buttons like tweets or pics. Not because of licensing, but because it will lead to the social media platform tracking the user without consent. Even users that have no account on that social media and never given consent to anything.

Compliant sites show some placeholder in gray typically with appropriate warnings. If the reader wants to reveal the element they need to click first.

Disclaimer: Not a web developer, not living in Germany, but German as a mother tongue.

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This is not entirely true (disclaimer: living in Germany, with a German-based business).

You can embed social media.

What you can't do is embed a social media post without disclosing in the cookie notice (that must be approved beforehand) what will happen to the user due to you doing it.

But isn’t the embedded element already setting cookies before the user can reject the cookie notice?

Only if you render the embed before the user accepts which is under the control of the developer/site, even though many don't bother to do that correctly I bet.

I believe the ePrivacy Directive (aka stupid "cookie law") merely required disclosure of cookies but didn't ask for opt-in, so disclosing that you're setting cookies might've been enough.

The GDPR absolutely requires opt-in before setting cookies (or collecting user data in other ways, it isn't specific to cookies even) so the embeds would be in breach. Whether it's the responsibility of the parent website or the embedded element to ask for consent is another matter.

That's interesting...do you know if there's any distinction made between social media embeds and just linking to external resources? I guess you could make a similar tracking argument for images linked from an external site (for example).

There is no difference between social media or not. You are not allowed to track without explicit consent.

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