Some examples include
- Banning encrypted messaging (almost passed)
- Cookie pop ups
- Various regulations harming open source (discussed before on HN)
Also due to how Europe is wired up, the cost of doing startup business is higher, why there are fewer and fewer successful European software growth companies.
> Banning encrypted messaging (almost passed)
It's a positive thing that it was brought up and struck down. EU is the actually the one you should be thanking because most European countries would ban it.
> Cookie pop ups
Malicious compliance by websites, but at least users have a choice of opting out of tracking. Again, a positive thing.
> Various regulations harming open source (discussed before on HN)
The most recent changes are so watered down that it basically only applies to commercial open source companies that are turning a profit. It's helping users more than it's harming the open source community.
If the legislation had been written correctly then the current nightmare wouldn’t exist.
Should have been a browser level setting the sites are forced to comply with. The pop-up per site with free rein how obtuse it can work was always gonna suck. Pure incompetence from the politicians involved.
It's true, though. The technical language could've been written in a way that makes it more difficult for websites to circumvent, and less annoying for users. Or the regulation could've been amended to clarify and improve the technical aspects.
That said, getting to a regulation at all was probably a bigger nightmare, with Big Tech lobbying against it every step of the way. So I'm glad that we even have the current GDPR, and that the EU is still leading the way in privacy regulations globally.
It was a prerequisite step for GDPR that was designed to legalise data collection and trading.
Before GDPR it was a gray area, now companies can easily get consent as users mindlessly click "Agree" to data processing and selling and they have a legal basis to do so.
These are corrupt laws, but most people blindly believe EU is good and totally not in bed with big corporations.
That's a cynical take. In reality, companies took advantage of the loose technical language to do the least possible work to comply with the law, while doing their best to implement dark patterns to confuse the user into clicking "Agree". This is something that can be improved with stricter regulation, but it will always be a cat and mouse game.
> It was a prerequisite step for GDPR that was designed to legalise data collection and trading.
Another cynical, and also false, take. The GDPR wasn't "designed" for that. In fact, it actively tries to prevent it. An EU citizen can contact any company in the EU and demand to access all their personal data, or for it to be deleted. This is an unequivocal win for people to regain control over their personal information.
Is this the best that governments can do? Certainly not. I'm still glad that at least something exists, and the tech industry is not entirely unregulated, as in most other parts of the world.
> These are corrupt laws
No. These laws are a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the strong influence and rapid pace of development of the tech industry means that governments will always play catch up, even when they want to pass laws that protect their citizens.
> most people blindly believe EU is good and totally not in bed with big corporations.
Citation needed. Name me a government that is not in bed with Big <industry>. Big Tech in particular is in strong symbiosis with governments, as they both share some common goals. So, sure, there's that. And yet despite of it, the EU still passes laws that fight Big Tech's reach, and fines companies when they don't comply. Can it do better? Sure. But name me a government on Earth that does a better job at this than the EU.
We don't need to get political here. But it's foolish to spew cynical takes when some governments are at least trying to fight Big Tech, and even more foolish to imply that their attempts are making things worse for its citizens.
If the goal of the GDPR was to train people to click "Agree" and to legalise data collection, then that law was an abject failure.
That said 33% of consent, legal to be sold is better than 100% of gray area.
Before GDPR you didn't have explicit consent and you still could be on the hook for trading personal data.
The system is working as intended.
Without tracking it's easy to:
a) compare the total number of visitors vs those who accepted tracking
b) just increase a counter for each "No"
You seem to be inverting cause and consequence: it's the websites who are annoying to the users, not the law. The banner is optional, it only exists because websites want to collect your private data, not even to make the thing work.
> Or the regulation could've been amended to clarify and improve the technical aspects.
The regulation has been clarified to mean something important: refusal must be as easy, visible and doable as acceptance, so people can click "refuse" everywhere. Lack of acceptance mean refusal, so people can close the banner.
No, I mean that the law could've been written in a way that makes giving consent less cumbersome for users. I agree with GP: if it had been a browser setting that websites _must_ comply with, like the abused and now dead DoNotTrack header, then we wouldn't have ended up with annoying consent forms to begin with. After all, it does make sense for this to be a global user preference, rather than something the user needs to consent to on each site. Even without getting into technical details, this should be evident to anyone.
I'm not aware of why this didn't happen, or why the DNT header was killed, but it wouldn't surprise me if the (ad)tech industry strongly lobbied against it, and won. The internet loves to criticize this oversight as incompetence from politicians, but politicians couldn't have elaborated the technical aspects of the law without IT consultants, and these surely understood what could be the implications. The fact they went with the consent form approach, and the fact this hasn't been rectified years later, is probably a sign that the tech industry still has considerable sway in regulatory matters.
But to blame this situation on the law itself, or the EU, is just delusional. I'm still happy it exists, warts and all.
Actually Google is seeing the wind turn and is slowly moving away from cookies, so it did even better than what you wanted: it will effectively kill (unnecessary) cookies as a whole.
I have no issue believing lawmakers did in fact take advices from IT experts, seeing how they could make the difference between useful and unuseful cookies. But the law never goes into implementation details, that's another level of regulation, and the real effect is coming: the major browser will block third-party cookies. That will change everything.
It was written correctly. Because it's a General Data Protection Regulation. It applies in equal measure to websites, apps, paper records, SaaS, shops, government entities etc.
And it says: "do not get more data than is required for your business. If you want more data, the user must give consent, where opting out is the default, and must be as easy as opting in".
Now, what exactly is badly written in the law? You can start with quoting exactly where it requires existing cookie popups.
For example, GitHub found out they need exactly none: https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/
> Should have been a browser level setting the sites are forced to comply with.
It's called the Do Not Track header, and at one point Safari removed it because the companies you think are blameless used it to track users
Getting the legalise of legislation right first time is almost impossible when there is an army of lawyers, paid by corporations, whose job it is to unpick it.
That’s not fine. It’s anti-thetical to the very idea of the web. Accepting this shit as a compromise is exactly what we did with adblockers and that battle is still ongoing, and not solved. Whenever the greasy finger of corporations end up inside our browsers, whether it’s fingerprinting or meaningless consent screens, or tracking cookies/pixels/scripts, things are not dandy, imo. I don’t have a solution. Just saying.
I'm genuinely curious and not trying to pick a fight here. The core idea behind html when it was first conceived was that it allowed you as the viewer to present that info in any way that you chose. You can change the font, etc to suit your own preferences.
This idea got killed by content providers who mostly want to hardwire their content layout because they know better. So where is this "idea of the web" coming from. Surely there's no longer a central core idea, it's just what each of us make of it, and as a result we're often in conflict about how things go.
Did choice get formally taken away? Does the content provider get to choose how it's done now?
Like with “democracy”, it is not possible to create a comprehensive formal definition that embodies the full spirit of the idea. Without getting too philosophical, the web is client-server based where the provider controls the server, and the user controls the client. There are fierce battles being fought on both fronts:
- Providers are being lured by ad tech giving you a free (as in beer) space in exchange for relinquishing any control of the server. An example would be YouTube where you get free hosting if you comply with opaque community guidelines and strike systems. Limiting linking to other “platforms” aka websites is another example. A more subtle example would be cloud infrastructure where switching provider is designed to be prohibitive.
- Users are under attack based on their IP geo, VPN usage, extensions (ad-blockers primarily), fingerprinting, UA sniffing, JS obfuscation, video DRM etc. The most egregious example is to force users to download an app (a client that the provider controls fully). Captchas is a more subtle example.
Note that there are real hard problems with a healthy web, notably DOS protection, which needs some level of client fingerprinting (like IP rate limiting).
However, large businesses – many of whose success is built entirely on top of the web – are actively eroding it for banal selfish reasons. Much like how democracy can be leveraged by those who don’t believe in it in order to gain traction, only to later be dismantled to maintain power and control.
Legislation is not a technical spec. It's made purposely to be interpreted. And companies are made to optimize their profit given the constraints set by the law. Sometimes companies have to bet that if they do X, they won't get a fine, and decide if they want to take that risk.
Companies can even bet that the fine will be smaller than the profit, which is often the case. And that, IMHO, is the problem: we (I mean our governments) should be much, much more aggressive with the fines. BigTech can basically do anything they want because the fines are always ridiculous (because BigTech are too big, sure).
Now, would it?
No it's not. People should be fired for proposing such things as they breach human rights.
It's like being happy that someone proposed genocide of all men over 60 to save on pensions and that the idea didn't pass.
Anyway, reading sibling comments it seems like it's not that simple either way.
> It's a positive thing that it was brought up and struck down.
You see, the thing about european legislation is that certain stuff, especially stuff people oppose, is proposed over and over again until it passes. It costs almost nothing to re-propose things like killing net neutrality or banning end-to-end encryption, but it's very costly to oppose them. Which the politicians and lobbyists know and use to their advantage.
Most notably, this means a bunch of stuff gets "zero-rated" (e.g. free unlimited facebook/whatsapp with any phone plan, but other data is limited), which was explicitly called out as anti-competitive when the fight was going on about net neutrality in the states.
But coming from a good idea - make vendors responsible for the software they put out, to prevent tons of abusive practices like shutting of cloud services making paperweights, or never updating massively holed software harder. The ramifications for open source were then realised, and the legislation which is still under planning/review has been drastically updated to make it more applicable for open source software.
> Banning encrypted messaging (almost passed)
But didn't?
> Also due to how Europe is wired up, the cost of doing startup business is higher, why there are fewer and fewer successful European software growth companies.
Which has little to do with regulations, much more to do with the size and wealth of the potential markets.
> why there are fewer and fewer successful European software growth companies
Is that bad though? Are software "growth" companies a requirement for something? There are tons of successful software companies in various European countries, just not at the level of their American counterparts. Again, with quote obvious reasoning - there are 4x the people in the US compared to France (which is top 2 by population in the EU), and Americans both earn and spend more in USD not adjusted for anything.
I really believe the primary reason is that Europe is not one culturally homogeneous area that speaks one language - like the US. Having that is such a huge benefit.
Doing marketing, promo, getting traction, legal documents, taxes, - anything - for your startup in your ONE country is already difficult. Now imagine doing it in 25 countries before you get to have scale benefits equal to the US or China.
Germany is so different, that we'll need to hire several experts for the different regions in Germany. France too. Italy and Spain, unattainable (we are told) without at least a local branch and solid local staff. That's still only a portion of the EU.
"Cookie banners" are not the reason tech is hard in Europe. If you believe that, you really don't know anything about Europe or the EU.
There are likely several reasons at play, culture being a big one. However, there are other reasons at play such as differences in law, financing, immigration, the job market. Bert Huber, an entrepreneur in the EU has given this some thought:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/is-europe-just-not-good-at...
[1] You can read the text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj there is a single instance of "cookie" (in the preamble) and no instance of "banner".
While DNT could potentially be used for opt-out, it wouldn't comply for opt-in because it is not specific or informed as the user does not know what specific data processing activities will be done, can't opt-in or out of specific data processing activities, doesn't know the identity of those doing them or that they can withdraw consent at any time.
There are proposed browser signal specifications that would meet legal GDPR consent defintions. See https://www.dataprotectioncontrol.org/spec/
And as for why DNT did not took off, it's because MSFT sabotaged it by making DNT set by default in Internet Explorer. The social contract in that time between adtech, publishers and users was that the signal would strictly be opt-in. The adtech industry used IE making DNT the default as justification for not honoring any of the signals being sent by browsers. It doesn't take a lot of reasoning to realize MSFT did this on purpose, knowing it itself earns income from ads.
You probably want to tell that to CMA first.
Browsers do not have automated means to give consent/not give consent under ePrivacy because the largest browser is ran by an ad company. Monetarily speaking, the ad company earns more if it coerces its users with dark patterns into giving consent under ePrivacy than it does offering pro-user choice technologies to give a blanket not consent.
And ePrivacy itself is not just about cookies. EDPB recently released binding recommendations that severely expanded the perceived scope of ePrivacy (the true scope was always as it is, the adtech industry just ignored it). ePrivacy includes JavaScript side tracking, fingerprinting with various APIs and so on. It's not just cookies.
Even more, many times I find myself wondering why a site is not responsive to my clicks just to find out there's some hidden cookie consent that didn't fire up properly and now I have to inspect the DOM to remove it manually.
It's funny how you slipped in "growth companies" in there.
How about... profitable companies? In the past 10-15 years most "successful" US companies have been fueled by unlimited investor money with zero expectations of profits. I mean, look at YC's "top startups list". They lose billions of dollars every year. But sure, they grow. Like cancer
Websites do not have to show cookie pop ups if they are using only technical cookies like auth tokens.
Go to European Commision page - bam, cookie banner.
Though yes, government services shouldn't use anything but essential cookies (for which you don't need a cookie popup)
You said only scammy businesses have cookie banners... no, all websites have cookie banners now in EU, and it's majorly annoying, unless you use extensions that click it for you.
(The most popular one is owned by Avast. Which is a horrible company that sells users data. So... yay?)
I didn't
> all websites have cookie banners now in EU
All the sites that collect more data than strictly necessary, yes.
Here's an example of a website that spent need a cookie banner: https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/
> The most popular one is owned by Avast. Which is a horrible company that sells users data
Indeed. This should tell you all you need to know about these cookie popups and companies that use Avast's, or IAB's or Admiral's cookie popups.