Thank the Lord reality (still) does not have cookie banners.
Shoot the actual problem (i.e. the dark patterns and malicious compliance of the concerned websites), not the messenger.
Incompetent regulators that are asleep at the wheel and still haven't done anything to punish this (GDPR went into effect in 2018) are definitely a problem though.
You can't expect websites to give you a pop up that asks whether they can monetize your visit or not. Everyone's going to click "refuse" because ads are annoying. As a consequence your website makes no money. At that point why run the website at all?
Regulators don't want to regulate too hard, because it would ruin all the freely available websites.
Many European websites are now proposing users to either accept cookies or buy a subscription to the website. This looks like a very sane way to address the problem to me.
> You'd just have more and more websites that block European users.
Why should I care? Market changes, adapt or disappear.
This is not the market changing, it's a law crushing a free market that already existed.
In that case, what’s the difference between a free market and a compulsory market?
If market participants must only participate by choosing to spend or to not spend, they are beholden to the economic system, and are unfree actors in the status quo “free market” economic situation.
And yet by exercising political freedom to make themselves (more) free, these unfree participants in the “free market” somehow make the market unfree, and instead of viewing that as a benefit to market participants, you view it as a loss of freedom in the status quo “free market” to the detriment of the unfree participants.
I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, just trying to understand where you’re coming from.
There was never any “free market” status quo in the absence of regulation to begin with, either in statute or in practice. There always are forces external to the market which act upon it, and some of those forces are individuals and groups of people.
To say the free market exists, did previously exist, or could one day exist, is a truth claim I don’t see the evidence to support. Advocating for a “free market” as opposed to the status quo is both an economic and a political position, and thus should address both economic and political aspects of the issue you present.
What about this would you rather be different, and how so? Or what about this would you characterize differently?
The same could be said about outlawing slavery. Before you scream at me, let me take a step back: of course ad-tech is by far not as horribly bad as slavery. Still the practices they established in the last decades are a violation of human rights, in the european interpretation. They track and profile humans online to a level no private investigator could do offline. And we are at the beginning of what is possible: people place network active microphones and cameras in their homes or carry them around all day. Devices they no longer control, since "no root for consumers" became a security feature. Public spaces are increasingly surveilled by networked cameras, physical advertisements in public spaces and private businesses track wireless signals of nearby phones. Privatized mass surveillance became the norm in cyberspace and the same is happening in meatspace as well. And at the same time the algorithms that guess which content best manipulates individual people into buying, voting or believing something are getting better fast and are deployed at scale.
We are at a crossroads of how society will develop, and this mentality that corporations can collect and use personal data however they like (and they like to manipulate people) is no longer acceptable. And if these corporations weren't creepy enough with their systematic stalking, governments lean more and more towards also using that data. As long as the government promises it is "just for fighting crime" people are somewhat consenting, but on the territory of my country we had two totalitarian regimes in the last century that abused data gathering at scale to identify and oppress their political opposition, to terrorize and murder them. Horrors like the STASI must never happen again. Say no to surveillance capitalism while you still can, demand a constitutional right to the protection of personal data now! Because the freedom of governments and corporations must be limited, so the freedom of the people is preserved.
The market must change, it is necessary. What we want is that you can take your smartphone and tell it that it is ok if it connects to the supermarkets augmented reality and every ad-space you walk by becomes a personalized experience, if that is your choice. That is your freedom. Don't let the ad-provider of the supermarket make that choice for you. Don't let someone tell you that freedom means you could choose to not go to the supermarket and instead grow potatos in your one room flat. That is bullshit. Fuck that free market, give us free people.
Great! It frees up space for more respectful alternatives.
However ads are universally disliked and the problems the current ad model brings (privacy, spam/scams/malware, inappropriate/illegal content, etc) are generally universal too, so it's just a matter of time before similar regulation is enacted outside of Europe too.
> because it would ruin all the freely available websites.
Laws against theft/robbery/carjacking ruin free/below-market-rate car rental websites too, yet nobody is complaining about those because society has decided that theft is bad even if it would technically open up new business opportunities that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Why should this be any different?
My main issue with it is that if I disable cookies, then every single time I need to accept it. If I enable cookies then I only need to accept it one time. I think this annoying thing actually reduces security, because people are more likely to just not delete the cookies at the end of the session to avoid this annoying popup. Makes the web totally unusable if you delete the cookies regularly without a plugin to hide the cookie banner.
It didn't bring any benefits and has wasted excessive amounts of my time.
First-party, non-tracking cookies do not require a cookie banner.
I'm always flabbergaste how good the propaganda machines of ads agencies is that people are actively fighting protective measure on their behalf. Nihil novi sub sole I guess, but it's fascinating to see this process happen first hand.
You should've been running a blocker already. I run third party blockers as much as possible, but these banners are just excessive and useless.
That's just plain false. I know many people, especially in the older, less technically literate people, who now systematically disable such analytics thanks to these banners – people who had never realised the real dimension of users tracking before this law.
Want to have ads? Cookie banner. Want to have YouTube/Twitter/whatever integration? Cookie banner.
europa.eu has a cookie banner. A website that doesn't even need to pay its own bills!
That's just wrong, you don't need a cookie banner for non-tracking ads.
Regardless, I block the ads, but I'm still trying to figure out to block all the dialogs about cookies for the ads I'm blocking.
No, you only need a cookie banner if those third parties collect data.
Because they fundamentally don't work. The EU politicians had to have known that they didn't work from previous experience, but decided to inflict us with these pop ups anyway. Their own damn website has this pop up.[0]
Reasons why cookie banners don't work:
1. They need to be implemented by the website. This means that if a website decides to ignore the cookie law they can set all the cookies they want and you won't be notified. If they are outside of the EU's jurisdiction they won't even care.
2. Targeted advertising is how a lot of websites pay the bills. This means that websites will use every trick in the book to get you to not click on the "refuse" button. Why wouldn't they? You're using their server time, but generating no revenue if you refuse. Websites will fight this process. They'll eventually lose, but the internet will either turn into a splinternet or cable TV. Ads are what make free websites work and cookies is how it happens right now.
3. Websites are made by people who aren't always well-versed in legalese and can't just hire a lawyer for everything. They don't always know whether they need a pop up or not. The safer option is to put it up there. If the EU's own website has one then probably so does yours.
4. Popups are annoying.
Cookies should be handled by the browser. Not some harebrained JavaScript.
I believe +1 (202) 456-1414 is the number[0] you want to use.
There was a time when the likes of YouTube and blogging were just a hobby, not a job for pseudo marketers. Replacing paid "influencers" and "content creators" with plain hobbyists again would be a wonderful thing.
Paying for things online is still a terrible experience. You need a credit card, which isn't always easy to get outside of the rich western countries. I would never have used websites like reddit, HN, Twitter, YouTube or Google if I had had to pay for it. As a kid I wouldn't have been able to pay even if I had wanted to.
>No more clickbait, "this video is sponsored by ShitVPN", chumboxes, etc.
No, you would have even more of this, because this type of monetization is not linked to cookies.
Advertisers usually buy ads to encourage the purchase of a product/service. It is not sustainable to spend more on advertising than what the revenue you get back from it in the form of purchases - over the long term, the ROI has to be positive. Ad-supported services still exist in poor parts of the world despite the advertisers only being able to pay very little (as it has to be relative to the local price of the advertised goods/services), so the prices of paid services can similarly be adjusted to compensate.
> heavy region locks
This is already done, I'm pretty sure Netflix in India costs a fraction of what you'd pay in the US for example. While it's not an ideal solution, it's mostly a solved problem.
> Paying for things online is still a terrible experience.
Agreed on this one, but again the reason it isn't is because currently ads are a "good enough" model that there is not enough market pressure to develop something better. If ads become unsustainable, the content industry will have no choice but to either die out or compromise and collaborate to develop a payment model that has better UX.
> you would have even more of this
Only if it's allowed. If ads are nuked out of existence due to enforced regulation (promoting products makes you a reseller from the eyes of the law and you need to assume liability and provide support & warranty) or even just platform rules (posting commercial content on YouTube requires a costly subscription - shilling sponsored products without it will result in a ban) you wouldn't have it.
Thus the “new” GDPR is predicated on the idea that consent given under “... or GTFO” terms is invalid, given the imbalance in negotiating power, and said consent (where required) had to be voluntary by that definition. The result is cigarette-labelling-level malicious compliance on part of website operators (and compliance-in-a-box vendors they use).
Many of the things you see, such as requiring you to turn off every single “purpose” or “partner”, are manifestly illegal (or rather, don’t legally constitute voluntary consent, so showing them is legal but tracking you afterwards isn’t), but enforcement has been lackluster so far. We’ll see where we end up I guess. (I genuinely don’t know how I want this to go.)