> This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
I wonder if sites will ever stop lying about this.
It also provides negligible benefit for any EU subject, compared to what the privacy-conscious users could achieve via self-help for themselves – by not registering, or clearing cookies, or using other tech measures.
Have trillions (or quadrillions?) of EU cookie popups actually preserved any privacy at all? Or just wasted staff time, reader time, & trained a 'consent dialog blindness' into users worldwide?
The cookie popups were the wrong response to well intentioned legislation, the proper response would have been to stop using cookies, not to use these stupid banners.
Functional cookies were never a problem, but tracking people indiscriminately is a problem.
Consent dialog blindness is a good term, but it is caused by the makers of the consent dialogs not by the legislators. Not tracking is a viable alternative and does not require any dialogs.
What's the tangible harm of this supposed "indiscriminate tracking" - especially as compared to other burgeoning EU initiatives like demanding law-enforcement backdoors into e2e chat sessions?
The consent-dialog-blindness is created by the regulatory demands for their constant re-display, for negligible benefit. If not even asking for cookies was 'viable', major sites – who have far better understanding of the relative tradeoffs than the regulators – would've gone that way. Can you name any that chose that 'viable' path? Are they winning their categories with that 'viability'?
You know what else is 'viable'? User self help. Clearing/disabling cookies. Running a privacy-protecting browser, like say Brave.
The EU could've protected a lot more privacy, without wasting the world's time & burning-out people's attention, if it had coached people into self-protection, rather than threatening businesses worldwide with fines. But hey, haughty mega-super-state's gotta do mega-super-stating.
But also, they know that implementing (& maintaining!) compliance, moreso than a simple block, has nonzero cost, while EU readers provide them negligible benefit. So they take the easy way out, given the incentives created by the EU.
And what had been a free bonanza for EU readers – a peek into info sources from elsewhere, easier for the sites to provide than to limit in any way – has had extra friction added by the EU, to the detriment of EU subjects.
But at least they shouldn’t blatantly lie in the message they show, saying they’re working on it and how important EU visitors are.