How many cumulative wasted hours have been spent tapping through cookie pop ups?
I made a game about it if you feel like wasting even more of your precious life on pop ups.
However it's deeper since the popups we see today were never recommended nor required by the original regs. The laborious nonsense we endure was invented by websites as a workaround for the regs. So it wasn't obvious that consent parity would ever need to be clarified like this because it wasn't even obvious that the industry would come up with such an awful popup pattern to begin with (though in retrospect we should've known I guess).
The fact the popups were never even compliant anyway is just a combination of wilful ignorance, dark patterns, consulting companies wanting to sell something and - yes - an added set of people innocently misinterpreting regulation.
Lots of things are subjective judgement calls. They are not all nonsense.
Most of our longest standing torts and crimes have subjectivity right at their core, and I'd argue that's not a coincidence but survivorship bias.
The world just isn't black and white, and attempts to legislatively render it so inevitably cause problems (though, obviously too much subjectivity and something because uselessly vague; it's a tricky balancing act for sure).
> The other legal tradition underlying the EU copyright system which is the continental European tradition of droit d’auteur (or Author's Rights). In this system, the authors of cultural works have certain inalienable rights that they cannot sell to a right holder. And, importantly, the exceptions to copyright, the interests of the public are written into the law. [...] The problem with the continental system is that it is quite inflexible because every time a new technological development comes about, you have to change the law to allow this type of use without a copyright infringement. So every new way of dealing with culture is fobidden by default. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL_Wxu6x1HU
Whereas other legislative cultures prefer to set a general framework, then leave the details to the Courts and or to Government ministers.
I mean the EU published a guideline on what it calls deceptive design patterns. They are quite clear there with what is unacceptable (link to PDF): https://edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2023-02/edpb_03-2022_gui...
When even Google felt they had to make "reject all" equally big and not hise it in a sub menu, you know that everything else is likely not legal.
¹: whether you use cookies for it or not doesn't matter
I think that the poster was saying that the popups themselves as a concept were never recommended nor required by the regulations.
Yeah I guess the word "require" has a few interpretations. The regulation didn't explicitly require popups, it required user consent IFF a company wants to collect/process/sell data the company doesn't need, but the intent was that companies would not do this, with consent being the exception, and the mechanism of consent was neither prescribed nor a focus: it certainly wasn't annoying popups per reg.
Only when deceptive patterns became clear the EU made clear that allowing one simple "ok" option and a million convoluted ways to say "no" is not resulting in informed consent.
Wheter you us a popup or hide it in a menu with the default of not tracking does not matter.
The frontend content screen component of the whole topic was something that emerged afterward as businesses' attempt to get away with continuing rampant unfettered data collection.
when you join a poll you do so with consent, when a market/social/political research entity invites you to a focus group (for example) you get at least a coffee and snack if not real money.
websites just get this for granted? it’s like stealing. it will never stop until the industry gets some understanding of these concepts.
This is the industry that perfected psychological manipulation in the pursuit of profits. It's built on decades of research into the best ways to associate brand names with positive feelings, and plant a desire to make a purchase in the subconscious mind of consumers. They will do anything humanly possible to deliver ads to your senses, and they've corrupted every media technology to do so since the existence of public broadcasting.
The internet has just given them the most profitable delivery mechanism, and in turn has made technology companies insanely rich. These adtech giants rule the internet, and can build the playground they need to make ad delivery more efficient than ever. Now these profits can trickle down to website owners, which will in turn take the path of least legal resistance, and employ every dark pattern imaginable in order to maximize _their_ profits.
And if this corrupt business model wasn't enough, adtech companies can perpetually multi-dip by selling the data they collect on shady data broker markets.
So, no, it's not just stubbornness, or lack of understanding. Deceit is built into this industry, and these cookie consent forms are just the tip of the iceberg.
The solution requires much stronger regulation than the GDPR. Unfortunately, this is very unlikely to pass given the influence advertisers have on governments.
Isnt the user getting free content in return?
Archive for life.
Free content was around before advertising on the web, this whole 'but they get free content' spiel was cooked up by advertisers.
Static we pages are cheap to host. Very rare is the article on [news site] getting mllions of simultaneous hits. But they all want videos embedded everywhere, gifs galore when all I want is to read their 20 min video in 2 minutes. They want their website hosted on the cloud with every new/hot architecture out.
How mant nyt articles are reprints of a reuters article the nyt then turns into 10 pages with aforementioned videos etc.
They did this to themselves.
A bigger question is: why didn't they go with the DoNotTrack header.
> P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a... for more info."
The GDPR requires that consent be informed, explicit, freely-given, and limited to a specific use case. Of these, the "DoNotTrack" header could be at most freely-given. Its design as a binary yes/no that can be configured across all sites prevents it from ever being used as a way to grant permission to track.
While the presence of "DoNotTrack=1" could be used to assume that no permission to track has been granted, this is already the default assumption that the GDPR requires companies to make.
There are at least two solutions for that:
1. Force browsers to support the header.
2. Always send the header "DoNotTrack=boolean", then force websites to take action (show a popup) when there is no header.
They aren't a form of malicious compliance at all, because they aren't compliant at all.
Maybe not quite as privacy conscious, but a quick workaround: (1) Open in incognito (2) Click big, easy to find "Accept" button