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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I always get downvoted for saying this but I think the cookie banners broke taboos about intrusive and annoying pop-ups in web sites. There was a time the tech and design oriented people could fight against it for the users but once it was required or maybe “socially positive” it got much harder to fight against all the others so you find the blogs now that will interrupt you three times to give your email and such.

Cookie banners were the “broken window” that led to the whole car being demolished.

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We’ve had far more annoying pop ups and banners since the 90s. One of Opera’s primary selling points at one time was its popup blocking capabilities and that was in the 90s or latest in the 2001/2002 timeframe from what I can remember.

He's not saying that cookie banners were the first pop up. He's saying that you can delineate a before time and an after time that is delineated by the cookie banners. Before: pop ups were bad and browsers would advertise about how they defeated pop ups. After: pop ups are acceptable and you're bad if you want to defeat them.

I remember the popup (e.g. new browser window) crisis circa 2000. Those were easy to stop because the behavior is easy for a browser to identify so browsers can't open popups if the action wasn't initiated by a user event handler and can open only so many in that condition.

Banners, modal dialogs and other kinds of "new popups" in general are a bit tougher. Usually there is some element you could remove from the DOM tree or display: none but the trouble is knowing which element!

The annoying thing is: it is not required by GDPR.

You can provide whatever the user wants to do. Recommendations? Sure. If you want them. The required data collection is then just.... Required. It is tied to this purpose though and can't be used e.g. for ads.

But it is not OK to collect everything about the user so you can charge more for ads or to sell ("exchange") that information. Which is in 99% of cases the reason for these banners.

Why didn't they just ask some human factors people about it and come to some solution like: "if you don't respect Do Not Track you go to jail"?

How are you able to recommend content to a user without having previously asked for consent?

Either you have no data and so no information to tune your recommendations or you have data in which case you needed to request for consent

Or you can recommend content related to what's on the page. Same way TV & other traditional ads tend to work, since they can't track users.

Same way Spotify does it on startup: ask about a few things.

IANAL, but worked through implementations that can work without banner consent.

I don't want to imply that it is easy or anything. It's pretty annoying, especially as the purpose of that data needs to be tightly tracked. But it is totally doable.

There's been an overall progression toward intrusiveness for as long as commerce has been on the internet. We had "sign up for our newsletter" and other pop-ups way before GDPR.

I think popup blockers turned back the tide for a while, but businesses eventually learned how to leverage dialogs for some of the same purposes. And, over time, that's been rolled up into WordPress plugins and other easy to implement solutions for one-off site owners, which makes them even more common.

Yeah. If there MUST be banners then, hey, why not cover half the #%^*ing screen with a “give us your email” banner.

Or give us feedback. When I'm on the site for the first time...

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