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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

I have a contrarian view on this. I really don’t think governments should be making technical decisions for the product design unless it directly impacts health issues. If fixed batteries makes product smaller or better then it’s choice of creator, maker and hacker. Consumer should be voting with their wallets and they should have a choice. This kind of constant interference from EU burocrates without understanding technical details is what led to completely pointless “accept cookie” disaster all over the Internet that has already cost billions of dollars collectively while not benefiting anyone.

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> Consumer should be voting with their wallets and they should have a choice.

I think we ran the experiment to know what consumer choice gets us: petrol with lead in it, and associated pollution and brain damage.

Do you have an ETA when the magical consumer choice / free market will finally solve issues of single-use plastic pollution, unrecycleability of most products, toxic e-waste poisoning children, slavery in the supply chains, etc, ?

tbf, gp does explicitly mention "health issues" as the exception where regulation is warranted

personally I would add "environmental impact" to the list of things that justify regulation which does cover battery/electronics reuse, but then making something reusable doesn't actually mean most folks will bother

"Environmental impact" is very broad - you can argue it to cover almost anything.

I think this the main problem: do you trust a bureaucracy(is. non-technical people working in good faith to make rules for the society) to understand the implications of products or do you trust the manufacturer to do the same. In my opinion the bureaucrat can have good intentions, but lacks technical knowledge, while the manufacturer has the technical knowledge, but has incentives to disregard safety.

In my opinion the manufacturer and the bureaucrat are the same thing. The bureaucrat’s chief priority is to get re-elected, not to make the environment better or cars safer. The manufacturers priority is to make a profit. Sometimes their goals align with the interests of the public but a lot of the time they don’t.

Both have incentives to undermine or promote public safety and both have different avenues of accountability.

But big corporate is a bureaucracy, upper-management people making decisions are not engineers and it's driven by political competition between different bosses jokeying for positions

Is there actually any difference?

I'd argue that environmental impact is a health issue.

The United States Public Health Service said TEL (leaded gasoline) was safe to use in fuel in 1925 as did the US Surgeon General 1926.

>I think we ran the experiment to know what consumer choice gets us: petrol with lead in it, and associated pollution and brain damage.

Nailed it. Meanwhile, there has never been an experiment with government intervention that has failed. For example, Agent Orange only existed because of consumer choice, as you astutely imply. So your point is airtight and not full of holes from every angle.

>Do you have an ETA when the magical consumer choice / free market will finally solve issues of single-use plastic pollution, unrecycleability of most products, toxic e-waste poisoning children, slavery in the supply chains, etc, ?

What's the ETA on magical government regulation fixing these problems?

> Agent Orange only existed because of consumer choice

I know how to fix politics using consumer choice - what if you could donate money to politicians, and whoever get the most money wins? Oh, wait..

I know how to fix corruption using government regulation - what if you have a dictator that decides who can take money out of the country and if they should invade Ukraine? Oh, wait..

No. The cookie disaster is because companies are making it a disaster. You're not required to ask consent for cookies used for technical purposes, such as managing user session.

The consent is only required for tracking cookies used to sell your data. So if you don't track your users, then you don't have to the pop-up.

I hope the EU comes down really hard on the companies deliberately making opting out of tracking difficult. A few billion dollar fines and those pop-ups requiring me to manually untick 300 different trackers will be a thing of the past.

> I hope the EU comes down really hard on the companies deliberately making opting out of tracking difficult.

At least NOYB does: https://noyb.eu/en/more-cookie-banners-go-second-wave-compla...

Companies have always had to ask for permission to store cookies. The user / user’s browser decides whether to allow them, how long to keep them for, which sites will be allowed to access which cookies.

This should have been / should be fixed on the user end.

Fixes were attempted on the user end decades ago. What did companies do? They ensured the end user was flooded with browser initiated cookie requests. Notice a parallel with the current situation?

Browsers now use better approaches, but nothing is guaranteed when web developers try to circumvent the protections because they cannot accept that no means no.

Malicious compliance in action.

Browsers rejecting cookies just leads to the website displaying a popup to please enable cookies or else you’re not allowed to see the content. That’s actually even less user-friendly.

Data processing consent covers much more than just cookies.

> Consumer should be voting with their wallets

I bet Americans love picking a $80,000 hospital bill over a $90,000 one.

Government decisions, done well, go far beyond what voting with one’s wallet can. Oftentimes the consumer is just squeezed out of the equation and everyone’s price will follow.

One company decides to do away with replaceable batteries and you will say "let the consumer vote with their wallets." Then everyone does the same and the user can no longer vote.

What we get is instead a mountain of waste that everyone has to pay for, indirectly, forever.

What governments need to be concerned about are the things where the public good can't be managed by the market forces. People can't be expected to look at minute details of every single thing that's part of their lives. Also if choice is restricted because, for example, every maker does X thing, then people can't really vote with their wallet, because there's no alternative. I recognize that this kind of control is not flawless, but I take it, considering the alternatives we have seen so far in history.

That's the key point. Since earth will not start charging directly for any environmental costs occured by its exploitation we need other rules for dealing with this. Market forces alone do not account for the price generations after us will have to pay for it.

The only fault the EU has for the "accept cookie"-disaster is, that it didn't make tracking illegal and even bigger fines. It is only the fault of the companies that want to track us, not of the EU

Indeed. The cookie disaster is because the EU is being too nice. Of they actually brought down the hammer we would see a much nicer internet landscape.

I'm always all in for government regulation, as long as those regulations are in the benefits of the common man.

And (lacking) a fine multiplier for making the opt-out UI confusing.

It is indirectly due to EU's regulation. Average user doesn't care about your nuanced take, people around the world, billions of times have been annoyed by the cookie banner. If anything, the GDP lost due to this annoyance on a daily basis is probably in the millions if not billions of dollars.

I worked in ad tech for 6 years, specifically in cross device retargeting. I assure you, the loss of privacy direction we were heading in was far worse. The cookie banners are annoying and broken, but at least they represent a government starting to think about privacy.

I really don’t think governments should be making technical decisions for the product design unless it directly impacts health issues.

I’ll agree, with one caveat - governments MUST price in externalities appropriately.

In the case of batteries in things like cell phones, that externality is excess waste and more mining of raw materials. There should be taxes applied somewhere in the supply chain to force manufacturers/consumers to manage that waste and reduce mining.

The disaster is caused by the implementation not the law.

This is needed in the US too. I just bought an electric toothbrush to replace a very old one. My old one is 10+ years old. Has easily replaceable batteries. New one? Nope! Manual says if battery doesn’t hold a charge, remove the battery and recycle the device. Removing battery literally destroys the device.

There are videos on YouTube that show the battery is literally a Panasonic generic one. Wanna bet if this new brush can be used for 10+ years?

But you have a choice to buy toothbrush from another brand. Don’t you?

Can you provide an alternative toothbrush with easily exchangeable batteries as easily obtainable a the one in question?

Markets are not efficient nor complete. And telling ourselves that is a lie.

How would they maintain a water proof seal if they allowed for a user replaceable battery? Wireless charging allows the battery to be charged without allowing for any gaps in the toothbrush, but achieving water proofness disallows letting the user take it apart and still have to considered to be in working condition.

It's a shower proof seal for a toothbrush, literally just need an o-ring, you know like the one that keeps the water in the pipes. The parent said the old one had a replaceable battery and worked for 10 years, seems like they had already solved the water ingress issue.

Yes, but you never used those old style electric toothbrushes in the shower right? An O-ring would just confer water resistance, not water proofness. You couldn’t really submerge it and expect it to continue working. There is a huge difference between hermetic sealing an an O ring or a gasket.

As a child, I had a $20 plastic submarine that was powered by AA batteries. It could sit at the bottom of a pool for days on end, without water ever getting into the battery compartment of the engine module (which was sealed with a rubber o-ring).

I bet there are hundreds of counter-examples to your claim that water-proofing with an o-ring is an engineering challenge of the utmost difficulty.

I washed my old toothbrush. It gathers toothpaste gunk if not properly washed. It worked just fine for a decade. The motor finally gave up.

No way is this new tooth brush going to last me 10 years.

And people making excuses - do you know that kids electric tooth brushes have replaceable batteries? Shouldn’t that be a bigger problem? Here’s the kicker - kids electric tooth brushes don’t have replaceable brush heads.

Yeah - this is nothing but planned obsolescence.

Kids toothbrushes aren’t designed to be used in the shower.

> An O-ring would just confer water resistance, not water proofness.

The comment you replied to explicitly said:

> > an o-ring, you know like the one that keeps the water in the pipes.

> You couldn’t really submerge it and expect it to continue working. There is a huge difference between hermetic sealing an an O ring or a gasket.

No, there isn't. O-rings and gaskets are exactly what one uses to make stuff waterproof.

> How would they maintain a water proof seal if they allowed for a user replaceable battery?

So many things are water proof and user serviceable: Piping, engines, transmissions, water cooling (for pc or car) and those electric toothbrushes that have replaceable batteries.

This isn't a technical problem. We figured out how to make things water tight a long time ago.

None of those things are consumer products the size of an electric toothbrush. The old electric toothbrushes simply couldn’t be submerged or used in the shower at all, they were just water resistant.

GoPro has replaceable battery, sd-card, charge-port, hdmi-port, 3x microphones and a replaceable lens. It is smaller than a toothbrush and can be submerged.

If you want a simple example then take a watch. Waterproof for decades, and batteries are replaceable.

Further up in the thread here, there's a comment that people will rabidly defend manufacturer's horrible decisions with false arguments. I think your comment is a perfect example of that.

A toothbrush is cylindrical, like a pipe. We know gaskets exist. A threaded cap on the end with an o-ring would suffice to allow easy access to the internals while keeping even pressurised water out.

In fact, the majority of electric toothbrushes fail due to water entering the head end, and they don't have a good seal there.

> Further up in the thread here, there's a comment that people will rabidly defend manufacturer's horrible decisions with false arguments.

That in itself is an incredibly ideological remark. "These arguments are false/invalid/insincere! There is no cost/manufacturing/reliability/usage benefit to completely sealing a toothrush, gaskets/o-rings/re-welding are just as good!"

Ya, I get it: you'll make us buy the toothbrushes that became outdated 10 years ago through some sort of top-down government regulation, and we will grudgingly like it because all of our arguments otherwise for preferring the newer things are invalid.

You seem to be totally stuck on insisting, against incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, that waterproofing small electric gadgets while still retaining repairability and user-maintainability is some huge insurmountable problem. Even in the face of myriad examples of cheap, reliable, long-existing solutions.

Why is that; where does it come from? Is it some weird fetish you have, or what?

How do submarines work if you put some door for people to enter in, or how do submarines can fire torpedo without getting flooded? The answer is some engineers found a way to do it, there are videos and articles that will explain it if you are really curious and not trying to find the most stupid excuse possible (there are many electronics with replaceable batteries that work under water)

Aren’t you just making my point? If they have to get a reactor out of a nuclear submarine, they have to cut the whole thing open. Engine work is either done inside shell is cut open and they just reweld it back. It isn’t cheap at all.

> you are really curious and not trying to find the most stupid excuse possible

This sounds like you are trying to make a Reddit comment rather than an HN one.

>Aren’t you just making my point? If they have to get a reactor out of a nuclear submarine, they have to cut the whole thing open. Engine work is either done inside shell is cut open and they just reweld it back. It isn’t cheap at all.

Nope. My point was that you can have things in hyper hard conditions, underwater at high pressure and salt and you can still say shoot torpedo.

Do I need to send you video proof that tooth brushes with replaceable batteries exists or you can google it yourself? My son has one that is almost 10 years old too , it uses 2 AA batteries , brand is Oral-B .

Considering their previous one with a replaceable battery lasted a decade, something tells me that's a terrible excuse you are giving them.

Please don't excuse wanton waste. It's not a good look.

Think about it - my last tooth brush lasted 10+ years. Would it have if it wasn’t water proof?

It is quite trivial to make it able to be easily disassembled while also making it waterproof. A rubber gasket on the bottom with a few screws would work just fine.

Waterproof mechanical watches have been a thing for over a century now. They are small, serviceable and have no glued parts. It unfortunately seems the knowledge of watchmakers past hasn't made it into the phone industry yet (same for smartwatches, sadly).

Such knowledge had made it there: waterproof phones with headphone jacks and replaceable batteries did exist; examples are mentioned in the thread. People are just pretending it has been forgotten while in actuality deliberately ignoring it.

I find the "cookie disaster" a great outcome. This little bit of friction is great at letting everyone know the price for the loss of privacy.

No it just creates alert blindness. Most people barely understand what a cookie is. I was part of a team implementing cookie banners, and we were looking really hard for the best wording. But it didn’t matter because in user tests 75% of users were unable to tell us what was in the box. Most assumed it was an ad before reflexively closing it.

I don’t think it achieves that, though. I strongly doubt that one in a million people clicking on that button think about the privacy implications.

However, the cumulative frustration and time wasted by that button is probably quite large, across the world.

> I really don’t think governments should be making technical decisions for the product design unless it directly impacts health issues.

It directly impacts long term health issues at a global scale, through e-waste and carbon footprint. In your book this should totally be a governing body decisions.

1. Replacement battery would help with reparability, which is one step toward the sobriety needed to fight climate change.

2. I feel like the customers do not have much of a choice if no product allows to replace the battery. So there is no way to vote with our wallet.

3. Which cookie disaster? I only see a directive that enforce companies to reveal when they are tracking users.

> Replacement battery would help with reparability, which is one step toward the sobriety needed to fight climate change.

I have some bad news for you: https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/shipping-emiss...

Where is the sense in greenwashing yourself about recycling your lightbulb when it was made 6000 miles away, and added more CO2 emissions than manufacturing it end-to-end?

The original article (linked to in German) pointed out that the main problem was that used batteries did not get recycled to an enough extent, and therefore battery manufacturers today depend too much on imports for their raw materials.

In other words, the new proposed rules were intended to benefit primarily the industry in the long term, not necessarily the consumer. Product design departments may not think farther than the next product, but their higher-ups should be concerned.

The solution is not replaceable batteries but better way to recycle electronics. How about if we have separate bins for electronic recycle available to everyone? How about people get paid to recycle electronics? The beurocrates are generally not good at solutions or ideas which is why they make up “accept cookies” laws.

This also reminds me how people are blamed in 3rd world countries for throwing the trash on street. The solution is to give people garbage bins and have garbage trucks pick them up. No one likes to throw trash on street. But no politician there has managed to thinks of this as solution yet. Burocratic solution is levy taxes, fines and have celebrities clean street for a photo in press.

Voting with one's wallets is about as helpful as trying to boycott a global corporation. If it was any effective the cookie banners wouldn't exist anymore.

> If fixed batteries makes product smaller or better

I don't think I've ever used a single product that is better for using fixed batteries. Even the size is arguable; if hearing aids can have replaceable batteries then so can Airpods.

I would have agreed with you 20 years ago. Nowadays, I look at the planned obsolescence and continent of floating plastic garbage in every ocean, washing up on every beach, and choking every river, and I'm think "we fucked this planet up and we can only fix it if we regulate the hell of this stupid for-profit market."

What about the health issues that takes decades to unfold, or those of future generations?

The german constitutional court (and IIRC the dutch one?) ruled that any govt action will also have to account for the "right to future" of current and coming generations. Trashing our planed (literally, in this case) doesn't square with that.

This kind of "constant interference" from the EU is very welcome on my part and on the part of anyone who has spent a bit of time thinking about sustainability, pollution, and generally the question of "how do we keep a planet worth living on?" Your borderline-religious (borderline because it lacks a moral backing, it seems to mostly do away with morality altogether) dismissal of "interference" is exactly what got us into this mess.

Well, it benefits me. I don't want to yield data I don't need to and I will not accept any godforsaken cookie.

I'm very happy to be made aware by the sites themselves of their degree of sleeziness.

> unless it directly impacts health issues

If manufacturers need regulation to correctly protect consumer health, what makes you think they will act in favor of the environment or repairability?

GDPR may be one of the best things that has happened to internet privacy. If websites wouldn't track your every move, they also wouldn't need to put up a cookie banner. In fact, the EU is the only power that actually puts up a meaningful fight against Facebook, Google and co's rape of the internet.

I think it's extremely arrogant of you to assume that laws like GDPR were just made a bunch of bureaucrats without "understanding technical details".

You might be right but I have a friend to worked at Apple that would claim Apple could only make their phone smaller by building in the battery. He didn't seem to notice that Samsung built phones with just as many features with a replaceable battery.

This will only work in an extremely rich and well education population like Switzerland or Norway. In many places the consumer doesn't have a choice or time to do the research against the advertising and PR of a large corporation.

> Consumer should be voting with their wallets and they should have a choice.

This only works when there are no monopolies or oligopolies.

This is an idealistic view that is not worth anything because most markets have monopolies and oligopolies.

1. Why do you think they are EU bureaucrats who don't understand technical details?

2. Are you sure the others aren't focussing too much on a few technical details, losing the global perspective?

I’m not sure about anything around this story, because in good HN tradition, the original link is to some guy’s 5 second summary of an article in a language I can’t read. But it doesn’t seem implausible to me that government regulators could have overlooked important technical factors while pursuing a politically advantageous agenda.

> I’m not sure about anything around this story, because in good HN tradition, the original link is to some guy’s 5 second summary of an article in a language I can’t read.

So widen your fucking horizons and learn a few languages. Being uneducated to start with is one thing, but staying uneducated is a choice. (At least in most places; it's mandatory only in very few jurisdictions.)

> But it doesn’t seem implausible to me that government regulators could have overlooked important technical factors while pursuing a politically advantageous agenda.

Oh, yadda yadda. You had proven your parochialism already.

I'll agree it's hard not to have mixed feelings about it.

On the flip side, every charged with a mini-USB or USB-C for a reason.

And internally, most electronics use standard battery sizes anyways, AA or AAAs.. I'm not a subject matter expert, but looks like they are just packaging high quality rechargable batteries inside a device.

For innovators they could simply apply a fee, that would allow companies like Apple to do whatever they want, so long as they (or their customers) pay.

I agree. And there are lot of products that I don't WANT to have a crappy three-cent plastic door on, which will inevitably break, just so I can replace a battery that I will never, ever need to replace during the normal lifetime of the product in question.

Those cookie banners at least force companies to show what they were actually doing. What it did is exactly what you suggests, giving consumers the choice.

Now, how can a consumer vote with its wallet? Are you able to tell the whole environmental, social and impact on wars of any device you buy? Personally I can't.

I also think that making the end user the sole responsible for the impact of the whole chain action is horrible. This is exactly what the ad with the fake native american crying about littering in the us was about. Let's company introduce an insane amount of plastic in the environment with no idea how to re-process it once used, the sole responsibility of the pollution will be the last person in the chain: the consumer.

It brings me to the last point, isn't it's the role of a government elected by the people? To represent them and balance the power?

I believe this is mainly about sustainablity over consumer protection

Thank you. The number of comments saying “let’s have the government force people (companies) to do X” is alarming.

If governments didn't force people or companies to do anything then they would be allowed to do everything.

You're welcome to draw up a table which surgically defines what should be regulated or legislated, and what shouldn't. I'll just drop by later to tell you how alarming your assessment was.

After all who's the government to tell companies not to put asbestos in your walls or lead in your water. I'll be honest, every time someone complains governments shouldn't regulate I wonder if they realize they might be alive because of that.

There is a pretty broad spectrum here. Both of the examples you cite are clear cases of public health and regulation followed discovery of damage. There is no such danger or clear public safety case for batteries which is why it feels like over-reach: regulation based on preference rather than fact.

> If governments didn't force people or companies to do anything then they would be allowed to do everything.

And that's okay. If consumers didn't like their products then they would stop buying them. iphones don't have replaceable batteries but people keep buying them because they don't see that as important. There are phones with replaceable batteries that consumers can buy if they want them.

Why do you think being allowed to do anything is about products and choice? If companies are allowed to do anything, then you get monopolies, wage slavery, then corpocracy. Environmental pollution, human rights violations. We don't even have real choices right now, and we especially wouldn't have if they were let go any further.

I guess I’m not sure why you’re invoking such broad, general issues here. I see it as an issue of choice because I remember when I chose to change from the bulky replaceable battery phone I had at the time to a thinner, more comfortable one.

Yet on the flip side my current phone is by the the largest phone I've ever had, the hardest to hold since the one which clipped on my belt and had a pull-up aerial, yet it's also one of the smallest phones on the market.

Because the context was literally someone saying they're in favor of a complete lack of legal restraint on the actions of companies or individuals.

No they wouldn't because of the power dynamic. That's exactly where the government comes in. Google (and the associated OEMs) and Apple have together far more bargaining power than most customers together. Your lobbying power is 0 and even with massive coordination efforts it's hard to compound that 0 into something measurable without serious help from the government.

You need a mobile phone and you have very few choices. How exactly are you protesting? By shooting yourself in the foot and not getting a phone? By going to boutique manufacturers who can barely supply 1% of the market?

Your reasoning is good on paper but not realistic. I'll say it again, the reason you don't have asbestos in your walls or lead in the air (from fuel) isn't because you voted with your wallet but because governments did their part. That should be evidence enough that your assumption is wildly idealistic.

It’s not a large market because people generally don’t want one, but it’s hardly limited to boutiques either. Nokia and Samsung both sell smartphones with replaceable batteries.

Not ones anywhere near the 'flagships'. It's a niche, but those us who do want hardly have even the option to 'vote with our wallets'. Especially for something that has become near a necessity.

And you completely avoided their very valid point that the likes of asbestos and lead. Perhaps because you have no counter to it?

I guess I'm not sure what your standards are here. If you're expecting that there should be phones identical in every way to flagship models except that the battery is removable, I don't think that's reasonable, since the entire point is that the design requirement of a removable battery requires tradeoffs.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make about asbestos and leaded gasoline. I support those regulations because they cover much more important issues. As far as I know nobody's gotten lung cancer from not being able to remove their phone's battery.

No, it’s not ok, anymore than it’s not ok for me to come punch you in the face anytime I feel like letting off some steam. Things that don’t have any negative externalities are ok for you to do at any point, but quite a large number of things that you may wish to do affect other people, and you cannot violate their freedom in the process of getting more freedom yourself.

In the case of batteries and other electronic components, the amount of e waste is very much becoming a problem that other people are being forced to deal with, and that’s not even considering future generations, whose freedoms I very much argue should also be protected.

“Your rights end where mine begin” is very much a laudable sentiment, but we need to be honest about when things sneak over that line, and not fool ourselves because the negative externality isn’t blatantly obvious.

There are almost no recent smartphones with replaceable batteries. None of them very good.

And that's because the companies making them have almost all the power. The power of the consumers' wallet is essentially zero.

Almost as if most people don’t care enough about replaceable batteries?

> iphones don't have replaceable batteries but people keep buying them because they don't see that as important.

Primarc clothing sometimes comes with scraps of paper 'Help, i am being kept as a slave', but people keep buying it. That tells us they don't see slavery as important.

On the contrary, the fact that they were willing to die to end slavery doesn't tell us anything.

> Primarc clothing sometimes comes with scraps of paper 'Help, i am being kept as a slave',

I've never heard of that and couldn't find any reference to it with a internet search.

Edit: found it: https://metro.co.uk/2015/12/11/girl-finds-cry-for-help-note-...

The point is not spesifically about primarc, there are many products that awere produced with slave labour, from conalt mining to cotton in the 1700s and people keep buying them

>There are phones with replaceable batteries that consumers can buy if they want them

How are they going to do that when they're paid barely subsistence wages in corporate scrip that can't be spent on that?

"Governments being called on to do something for the people they represent, shocker!"

That's what governments are for, to do stuff the people want but can't do individually.

People should have rights. Governments should not be allowed to tell people what to do, as long as they’re not harming others.

In my book, allowing you to buy a device without replaceable batteries, a choice that you made freely yourself, is not causing harm.

Saying that “people want it” is not good enough. The majority may also want to silence the minority. That’s why we have rights.

What's actually needed is them both to keep each other in check.

The cookie disaster is a constant reminder that these government agencies need to be reeled in and limited. It’s also embarrassing that when I browse the web it’s more or less the EU’s single contribution. Good job!

cookie popup is not a disaster, it forced companies to tell their users they are tracking them

user replaceable battery is important because what's most likely to die 1st in your electronics is the battery, if it is soldered, high chance you'll have to replace your whole thing, producing useless e-waste

i had to replace my electric toothbrush recently because the battery died, but the whole thing was still in perfect condition, such a waste

>cookie popup is not a disaster, it forced companies to tell their users they are tracking them

Now people know that they're being tracked. Great. They are still being tracked and now are being annoyed with the modals everywhere. Those of us that get bothered enough can install some extension to hide them, but the for most people it's just another annoying thing they have to click away in order to continue what they were intended to do.

> Now people know that they're being tracked. Great. They are still being tracked and now are being annoyed with the modals everywhere

And now when I tell people 'companies are tracking you' noone calls me a conspiracy theorist any more. They say- yes they are.

Mission accomplished, this policy gets my vote

Reminds me of California’s prop 65: everywhere and on everything you can buy there is a warning that the place/thing could cause cancer. Technically true, but the information isn’t actionable because it is so broad.

Most of those banners and popups and "consent" dialogs are illegal under GDPR. And the parasites behind the biggest networks of them are slowly but surely getting what they deserve https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/iab-europe-tcf-gdpr-breach...

Even fully compliant dialogs are a pain in the ass. It's why addons like "I don't care about cookies"[1] exist.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/i-dont-care-about-...

Arrive on page, click "reject all", done. That's what it's like with fully compliant pages.

I prefer skipping the second step and not having government-mandated boilerplate interrupting my browsing at all. For something so bloody inconsequential, dismissing the warning is of more import than selecting an option.

Inconsequential? Without cookies of this nature the surveillance economy would have had a harder time getting off the ground. We're just numbed to it now because we've been continuously assaulted for decades.

Yes, inconsequential. As in, there are no tangible consequences to me (or likely anyone else) regardless of what option I select.

1. You don't need a dialog at all if you only use data that's strictly required for the functionality of your website.

There. Problem solved. In a different discussion someone even linked a great example of a GDPR-compliant site: https://github.com

See? Easy

2. Okay, for some reason you decide to collect more data. Just as easy:

You present the user with a simple accept/reject, where "reject" is clearly labeled, is the default selected option, and the website continues working when the user choses "reject"

See? Easy.

Those "pain-in-the-ass dialogs"? If they are pain in the ass, they are not compliant.

Any popup in my face is a PITA. I don't care about cookies, your newsletters, or coupons. Get out of my way and let me browse.

> Get out of my way and let me browse.

So, your beef is with people who implement all this.

We had that before the EU stepped in.

Ah yes, it's the EU that makes the web sites pester you with newsletters and coupons. It's the Eu that makes the web sites sell you data to literally hundreds of advertisers and trackers. Bad, bad EU.

all phones and laptops have user replaceable batteries, it just some users too stupid to do it properly. i wonder if, after some tragic incidents including lithium and screwdrivers, the next requirement of the eu bureaucrats will be that companies do test that battery can be replaced by the handicapped body positive 15 years old trans girl with iq no more than 80.

It is embarrassing that probably you are not aware on how ironic and stupid your comment is, since the web was started at CERN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web#...

so you might want to update your limited general knowledge or comment only on topics you really know what you are talking about. You see cookies because

1 the website wants to track you

2 the website ad-partners want to track you

3 the web developers are idiots and don't know that non-tracking cookies don't need a NAG popup

BTW GDPR is more then cookies, it is applied in real life too. Also it has benefits like forcing websites to implement a delete my account functionality too.

Saying the web started at CERN is about as much intelligent as saying the internet was originally a US military communications network.

But nobody here denied that the US military has contributed to the Internet we're using for this very discussion. Someone did, however, claim that "GDPR cookies are the EU's only contribution to the WWW!", either ignoring or ignorant of the fact that the Web was invented at the EU-funded (and -founded?) CERN.

So your equivalence is invalid.

> It’s also embarrassing that when I browse the web it’s more or less the EU’s single contribution.

This just indicate that you are unaware of the requirements of GDPR.

I’m aware the EU companies can’t produce any meaningful web tech so their bureaucracies legislate ridiculous things like GDPR. I get a little reminder every time I go to a website that the EU exists for some reason. They can’t sanction Russia, expect the USA (while constantly harboring anti-Americanism)to “do something” and pollute the web with these pop ups everywhere.

Honestly sounds like you are just being jealous of the benefits we get over here. Not sure that's what you wanted to achieve.

US companies curb stomped the rest of the world and ate up all the market share others needed to survive. The only country that has a non-US centric internet ecology is China, because they intentionally blocked western companies.

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