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Comment by VWWHFSfQ | Hacker News Reader

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Pretty tired of hearing this, the EU law does not mandate tracking pop-ups, it basically just says “you cannot collect information about a person without their consent”.

There are a million ways to do that, like not collecting data in the first place unless a user opts-in to your research group for example.

But companies chose the most user-hostile one intentionally. Essentially forcing everyone to give consent anyways (just click the big bright “consent” button!)

The fact that you’re able to maintain any amount of privacy at all on the internet is thanks to the EU, you can decline the pop-ups. If it wasn’t for that, then you wouldn’t even know when companies were abusing your data in the first place.

Check out a few official EU websites, they all have tracking popups:

— https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/de

— https://commission.europa.eu/index_de

Exactly. Nowadays on some websites which load for example twitter messages, they will show an inlined form asking you to consent (for twitter's tracking). The rest of the page loads, except the tweets.

I think the main issue is that the EU is very quick to regulate before it even fully understands the problems or what the potential consequences of the regulation would be. The cookie banners were an absolutely obvious outcome. And we're seeing it again right now with their draft AI regulations before anyone even barely understands what it is or what the problems are.

It's why EU simply can't produce anything useful at all because any European with a spark of entrepreneurial spirit goes to USA to start their company.

Not sure why you’re downvoted—the evidence is in your favor. This whole thread is basically about the EU not being brought along in what most consider a tech revolution, and it’s likely a direct response to their laws that are well intentioned, but practically onerous. Arguable, we recently saw the same thing with labor laws. The net result will be a smaller presence of American tech companies/jobs/services in Europe. Many self-identified Europeans here seem to be in support of that outcome—Godspeed!

If everyone chooses to comply with the law in the same annoying way, that’s a consequence of the law.

It may be a second order effect, but good governance means considering second order effects.

This is the web privacy version of, “but that wasn’t REAL communism.” Look, you guys made a law, and what happened happened. When someone criticizes the law because of the consequences it led to, you don’t get to whine, “but it was the fault of the people responding in a way that we didn’t intend!” If your best argument is that the law was vague as to what compliance meant, then that sounds like a problem with the law.

No, I'd go further and argue that the root cause of what you see as the destruction of the internet is the entire industry responsible for those privacy and tracking issues.

Edit: As pointed out by others in response to your comment, the same industry who decided to act like petulant children and take the most user-hostile approach - the one I'd assume you're lamenting - in reaction to the GDPR even though they didn't have to.

> But they decided to mandate the absolute most annoying, user-hostile mechanism possible.

Whenever you bump into such user-hostile and annoying mechanisms, it is not the fault of the EU law but the service. They make it that way on purpose, precisely so you blame the wrong people (i.e. not them) and have you give up from exhaustion.

It was not the EU that “ruined the internet”, it was all the websites hungry for your data above all else. They “comply” in the most spiteful manner possible by design.

They actually don't comply at all. The reject should be as easy as the accept, as big, and so on.

In most cases they rely on the fact that there are so many websites that someone else will get fined.

It would actually be quite easy to automatically detect and create preliminary litigation documents about those cases.

You might be interested in collaborating with NOYB on that.

https://noyb.eu/

The internet was already ruined by scummy companies overloading their websites with trackers. The EU just forced them to be transparent.

The EU law does not mandate anything, it's the website owners that decided to comply in the most malicious way. What a mature position, "tHe eU HaS RuInEd tHe iNtErNeT"

It's the endless capitalistic greed and urge to monetize every single mouse hover and click that has ruined the internet.

No, friend. Your anger is misdirected.

Advertising. It's advertising that has ruined the internet. It's advertising that created this surveillance dystopia, enabling businesses and governments, large and small, to exploit you and your loved ones. Not the EU. Advertising.

GDPR is just a tiny bandage on the thumb of an encephalitic newborn, infected at birth with an opportunistic pathonagen. That pathogen is called Advertising.

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