Cookie consent is dumb.
Cookies are not bad, and in fact are required for basically any website. What is the point of agreeing to them over and over again, when your only alternative is to not use the internet, or at least not to use that site?
Some companies might do bad things with cookies, but how does it help to condition us to agree to cookies on every website we visit.
The fix is to repeal this dumb law.
What does require consent is advertising/tracking/metrics cookies.
Transactions (for data) require consent.
TV, Radio, Magazines, Newspapers etc have worked for years just fine with generic, non-personalised ads. Or in the case of cable/sat, non-personalised ads + subscription fees.
If cookie consent forms reduce privacy violations, lower ad revenue and push these “content creators” off the web, that seems like a win-win to me.
Yeah, and you'll be damned if you ever have to adjust how your business works in order to satisfy the desires of customers not to be tracked and monitored.
I, and most people, have UNIVERSALLY found that we can just skip paying by skipping reading and lose out on nothing. And now we're not being tracked! Hooray! What's not to love? We can't read as much poorly-written op-eds? I think we'll be fine.
The fact that the law basically says you can’t cookie wall it (I.e accept or leave) just means that you either convince enough people that the price is acceptable, or you get off the internet. It’s not complicated.
So you show the service, with untracked ads. That’s it.
And if that doesn’t pay the bills, then you change business model or shut down shop. It’s not complicated.
tl:dr; making the user click "I agree" would work more for you in a court setting
> Cookie consent is dumb. - Yes!
> Cookies are not bad - Correct!
> Some companies might do bad things with cookies, but how does it help to condition us to agree to cookies on every website we visit.
What? Every site that has a cookie-banner does bad things with cookies. That is the very reason that they have to show it.
Also, it is extremely hard to imagine any beneficial outcomes that tracking would enable to outweigh the UX improvement of removing the consent-banner.
QA departments suffer through this crap all the time.
One should take care when writing a law aimed at advertisers, because they will find ways to make the greatest laws look stupid; no matter how sane they were on paper. (and this law was very sane indeed, but sadly still far too nice)
I don't want to outright force them out of business, since we do still need advertisers occasionally. But laws will definitely need to be yet even more strict.
Both the size, rate and amount of the fines needs to increase by orders of magnitude. The problem (and the internet in general) is simply much bigger than the current enforcement agencies can ever hope to keep up with.
The fix is to have the law recognize that data is extremely valuable personal property, that stealing it is a criminal act and that the predatory "buying" of it (such as offering a $ service in exchange for $$$$$$ worth of data) should be highly regulated.
Secondly, not all data can be treated as equally valuable, let alone "extremely" valuable. That depends on factors such as what the data is, who is using it, and how. A dump of user activity on a cosmetics site might be useless to a layman, moderately valuable to an academic researcher, and highly valuable to a fashion marketer.
Finally, if all data is extremely valuable, then anyone entering bogus data should be persecuted for fraud.
The solution is to educate the population on how these technologies work so that they understand the risks involved with surfing the web. These consent boxes are beyond useless because consent should be implicit when simply using the Internet. Ad block technology takes care of a lot of this already
Browsers do not "willingly provide" anything. Code is written to trigger functionality. You're ascribing motivation where there is none. Developers willingly write that code.
>If this is considered "theft", then copying anything without removing the original would be theft, which would be a huge problem for anyone advocating for free file sharing or "piracy".
Non-sequitur. Just because the API is there, does not mandate it's use. Free file sharing or even "piracy" can still happen without cognitive dissonance. It isn't the copying that is the problem, but rather the storing, caching, processing and monetization that taken together create a surveillance apparatus that is the problem. The connection to piracy, while undoubtedly seductive, fails to pass muster, because ultimately, entertainment wants to reach audience, and reap value, even if only in brand recognition.
Everyone else does not. Advertising fails to realize, the world is not full of brands looking to be recognized.
Actually, it does. That is how cookies work. This is where my sentiment of increased education around browsers and cookies would help.
> Non-sequitur. Just because the API is there, does not mandate it's use. Free file sharing or even "piracy" can still happen without cognitive dissonance.
You should have labeled this paragraph as a tangent rather than a non-sequitur. Copying the data keeps the original in place, but makes a new one for someone else. Thus, that is now their data and they can use it how they please