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For me having fridge ads is not bad (maybe even good). What's much worse is data brokers making money by selling everything that's known to every website about me to Cambridge Analytics/CIA/FSB.

Also, pop-ups are a bit annoying, but most of the time websites work OK if you refuse to save cookies. So, like, I'm 1 click away from stopping those political actors to have info on me - a W for me

> What's much worse is data brokers making money by selling everything that's known to every website about me to Cambridge Analytics/CIA/FSB.

Add CCP to that list and you might see some eyebrow raising in Congress.

We have finally reached the point at which nobody cares any more about the FSB or the GRU.

What is fenced off for Europeans? Admittedly I've been living outside of Europe for some time, but some of my self hosted stuff is still based there, and a lot of friends, and I haven't had or heard of a problem with being "kept out" of new products.

Let's go for an unbiased list.

You name the 10 most important tech products of the year so far.

And then we go through them and see if they are available in Europe.

I think the burden of proof lies on the one who makes a claim. So you should be providing list of services that are not available to europeans. And bonus points for not using "threads by instagram" in that list.

    the burden of proof lies on the one who makes a claim

Now you made a claim. Time to proof it.

Bard

basic logic and courtesy 1:0 TekMol

You literally made a claim in your very first reply: "Tech companies now seem to geo-fence their new products and keep European users out right from the start."

When asked for proof, you've run away.

Will you ever graduate kindergarten?

...or, say, in Japan.

> You name the 10 most important tech products of the year so far.

Do name them, please. And then revisit that list and ask yourself: how many of them exist because of two things:

- unlimited investor money with no expectation of profitability

- blatant disregard of data privacy, user privacy, and/or other laws.

Great example is OpenAI. They said they welcomed regulation. The moment EU proposed level-headed sensible regulation [1] that among other things required documentation on how foundational models are trained and where they get their data, Altman screamed that they would pull out of EU.

[1] https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-truth-about-the-eu-ac...

Personal anecdote, I think I've encountered a few news/radio stations being blocked (self censored), I think I can count the instances on one hand. I browse a lot. Certain services are blocked like Bard, and Meta Threads, but that's more common with services, even for countries outside the EU.

The only mildly significant thing is Instagram.Threads; other than that, I don't know.

Instagram isn't blocked in Europe.

Threads isn't blocked either. It's Facebook's own conscious decision because they haven't yet found a way to circumvent privacy laws.

I didn't use the word 'blocked', and I didn't say Instagram either.

I said Instagram.Threads, to separate between threads.net and threads.com.

> because they haven't yet found a way to circumvent privacy laws

So the fence is working.

> I said Instagram.Threads, to separate between threads.net and threads.com.

Ah, didn't catch that :)

> So the fence is working.

Indeed.

Sorry for misunderstanding!

I've seen few american news sites and shops showing the fuck you EU page.

which is a bit weird because if shops does none of the business with EU they don't even need it...

So you do remove the cookies regularly, but you also believe that removing the cookies is "shooting ourselves in the knee"?

Then overall, privacy is a much larger problem. For one, with generative AIs coming, it is very scary to realize that those big corps know almost everything about almost everybody (maybe not you, if you don't use cookies, don't have a smartphone, etc), and are technically able to train generative AIs with that data.

The second problem is that because the business model is surveillance capitalism, then big corps don't optimize for making a product that users are willing to pay for, but instead they optimize for gathering more and more data about their users so that they can make profit with it. Typically social networks play against their users in order to sell them.

Out of interest, if you don’t worry about privacy infringement why do you clear cookies?

Easy usage of paywalls which provide X free articles per Y time, for example.

>But is that really a problem? What are the real world negative consequences?

Loss [or lack] of privacy. I'm assuming you clear your cookies - why?

Proving a counterfactual (what would have happened without gdpr) is rather difficult to impossible. I would argue

1. Morally, are we encouraging tech to go in a more human direction? Definitely.

2. Operationally, is gdpr working well? I have gotten many companies to delete my data and stop spamming me by referring to gdpr, so on that front I see a big win. Cookie banners are not essential or required by gdpr but an industry choice to bully users to accept something. So on that front, I feel gdpr falls short as it still allows companies to go this route.

3. Economy wise, have we lost anything? Are data brokers an essential service for a functional society and economy? I don't think anyone or anything except spy services and as tech lose out from gdpr.

4. Communication wise, people rarely see the benefits and only the fallout from gdpr (cookie banners) and the lobby push against it (business newspaper articles on the horror of compliance as their company needs vast amounts of data on non- customers). The benefits are much more hidden.

Which useful service have you been locked out of? We're several years into full GDPR enforcement. I've only been locked out of some US newspapers, which is trivially by-passable, and some of the worst attention economy addiction boxes, which I'm, if anything, thankful for.

> I open websites in a new browser instance and then close the instance. So no cookies stick around. Because I have set Firefox to delete cookies when closed.

You go through more effort, time and work in just this one step every day than "all this work the GDPR causes"

"Is this regulation about no lead in our water helping us? Btw I have a triple filtration and reverse osmosis system at home"

...and ?

"I fixed problem for myself but I'd like for it to not be a problem at all for other people that are poorer or less technical than me" is perfectly reasonable stance to take.

GDPR doesn't cause this work. The industry you're busy defending is causing this work. It's almost trivially easy for most companies to comply with GDPR. Instead they want to sell your data to hundreds of trackers.

Note: I've misread the comment I replied to, and blitzar person wasn't defending the industry.

I should re-read things before I reply :)

Remove all the tracking code BOOM, thousands lines of code less to manage.

GDPR is only a problem if your main business is selling people's data. As it should be.