Hacker News Reader

Comment by stametseater | Hacker News Reader

The people on this site who criticize the GDPR don't even know what the GDPR does, including you. Cookie banners aren't from the GDPR, they're from the ePrivacy Directive as amended in 2009. I don't understand how you people even mix this up, the cookie banners appeared several years before the GDPR existed. It's like this site is a big pity party of surveillance capitalists whining into an echo chamber, remixing and repeating each other's confusions without any feedback from reality.

View on HN

Maybe (I'm too lazy to check this out). But from what I remember only after GDPR those banners went viral in clumsy, annoying, not useful and frequently unnecessary implementations. Maybe it's because of hefty fines introduced in the context of GDPR.

My point is: Did it help fighting privacy issues? I don't think so. Did it harm? I do think so. Will it ever be somehow measured for its effectiveness and be taken back/changed to be more effective? I don't think so. So better get rid of it.

I seem to recall that before the GDPR, cookie banners were basically a single "OK" button, annoying but at least usually floating near the bottom of the page. After GDPR. they became dark-patterned modal nests of unfathomable checkboxes and submenus.

I don't think it has made of jot of difference for privacy, but it sure has degraded the user experience of using the web.

> GDPR those banners went viral in clumsy, annoying, not useful and frequently unnecessary implementations. Maybe it's because of hefty fines introduced in the context of GDPR.

The problem is that not enough fines have been meted out. Had they been, we'd see less of the unuseful, annoying, unnecessary banners. Because they are this way on purpose: to make you "consent" to wholesale collection and trading of your data.

I was complaining about the cookies banners in 2009, but ok people tend to conflate the two but it is not fair to lash out to people saying they don't like X with a simple rebuff that the thing is actually called Y. China makes the hardware, America writes the software and the EU makes the regulation, is a very common critique of technical people in the tech sector who lack political and economical power compared to the value they create.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com