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Comment by Godel_unicode | Hacker News Reader

> why do the pop-up dialogs have meaningful choices?

Very few of them do. Typically it’s “accept” and “x”.

> why does there exist GDPR-compliant websites without the pop-up dialogs?

Because GDPR doesn’t make those other sites have them. It’s perfectly possible for GDPR to force some websites to have popups and not force others to. It’s still GDPR forcing the ones that it forces to do the thing it’s forcing them to do.

> But the GDPR addressed those flaws.

As you can clearly see from being on the internet for more than about 5 minutes, it in fact does not.

This is not a comment on GDPR one way or the other; my point is that we shouldn’t engage in political word games to try and avoid the inevitable consequences of actions.

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It's not word games, rather it depends on your starting perspective. If you believe in the right of individuals to be generally left alone, then the surveillance industry was aggressing before the GDPR. So surveillance companies adding a nag screen in an attempt to continue surveilling you isn't a fault of the GDPR, rather it's due to their own malicious compliance. They could have also chosen to just respect individuals privacy rather than attempting to ignore the law with a nag wall.

The general fallacy with the rest of your argument is that you're pointing to imperfect enforcement as a reason to indict the law. This is essentially defeatism and acceptance of whatever might be commercially lucrative.

I’ll say it again since you don’t seem to be able to understand. If a law makes you display a banner, it’s that law’s fault that the banner exists. Either change the law or be happy that it’s having it’s intended effect.

As to your strange fallacy paragraph, I’m not sure what you mean by imperfect enforcement. Perhaps you should explain in an amicus brief to the courts that decided those banners are compliant?

> If a law makes you display a banner, it’s that law’s fault that the banner exists

You're treating the surveillance activity as a constant. One could also just stop surveilling, and then one wouldn't need to display a banner either.

What you're saying is akin to saying that the law makes muggers wear masks to hide their faces. If you take the mugging activity as a given, and then compare how muggers act with the law to how they would act if robbery weren't illegal, then sure it's technically true. But unless you're making some larger constructive argument, then that characterization isn't particularly enlightening.

> I’m not sure what you mean by imperfect enforcement ... courts that decided those banners are compliant

Can you point me to these court decisions that say putting take-it-or-leave-it nag walls on websites suffices for obtaining consent to process personal information for non-necessary purposes? Because that would seem to run directly counter to the wording of the law.

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