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Comment by jakear | Hacker News Reader

If you can't even allow folks to serve your citizens fully benign content without worrying about what the legal consequences of writing a cookie will be in a far off land they couldn't care less about (quite literally a local news site), you don't deserve to be in government.

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You don't need to ask permission to set cookies, that's a complete misunderstanding of the law. The law doesn't even mention cookies.

You only need to ask permission if you're going to perform any kind of privacy invading tracking, regardless of method. You're perfectly allowed to serve out 'fully benign content'. The fact this geoblock is in place implies they are not serving 'fully benign content'.

The law doesn't even stop you from adding privacy invading tracking methods to your website. It only says you need the user's freely given consent.

You don't even know the law I'm speaking of but are able to confidently talk on it?

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

The linked law has nothing at all to do with cookies or the GDPR.

The linked law has to do with cookies (search the text), and nobody said we were talking about GDPR. Europe has a long history of awful legislation in this space, GDPR is just the latest incarnation.

There is basically a reference to the GDPR in the text explaining the background for this particular law, there is nothing in the actual articles of the law.

There was a time when we were able to read news articles with no cookie being set.

Tell your user agent to fix that, not your congress.

There was a time when we weren't scared of cookies

People are really more scared of cookies than they need to be.

It's not about whether or not your privacy is respected, it's about the cost of compliance

Which is zero if you weren't doing something shady to begin with. The law only prohibits stuff you shouldn't have been doing anyway.

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