Hacker News Reader

Comment by threemux | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, politicians don't spend much if any time thinking about second and third order consequences. GDPR is but one example, but instances of this abound. The default should be to mistrust new laws. Reagan takes lots of flak on the internet, but he was right on the scariest phrase being "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help".

Even worse, this thread is full of armchair lawyers that will confidently tell you there's no need for cookie banners in particular cases. Nevermind that there's hardly any case law about this and each country seems to interpret it differently. Any actual lawyer would tell you to slap it on there to stay protected.

View on HN

Cases != law in continental Europe. The law is the law. I don't think you're in a position to call others armchair lawyers

The wording was imprecise, but to the website owner, this is a distinction without a difference. Just because a civil law system is in use versus common law, you still need judges to interpret what the law is. Their decisions may not be binding in the way precedent is in common law systems, but they are still important in determining what might be legal or illegal in the face of ambiguous laws (that is, all laws)

That's not entirely true. Continental European law tends to be far more detailed than Anglo Saxon law, but still relies on precedents set in previous cases when there are ambiguities in the law, and when it comes to metering out punishment and damages.

> Even worse, this thread is full of armchair lawyers that will confidently tell you there's no need for cookie banners in particular cases. Nevermind that there's hardly any case law about this and each country seems to interpret it differently. Any actual lawyer would tell you to slap it on there to stay protected.

I bet the number of cases of illegal implementations due to insufficient consent are vastly smaller than the blatantly illegal consent implementations(i.e. those that make it harder to reject consent than accept it). Companies clearly don't care about following the law anyway.

> Any actual lawyer would tell you to slap it on there to stay protected.

Presumably, lawyers err on the side of caution? That doesn't mean they're right.

I'd think so too, but the number of implementations that use dark patterns that make it more difficult to reject consent than accept it seems to indicate they aren't erring on the side of caution.

I'm not talking just de-emphasising the reject option here, but cases where there is no reject option or it's buried beneath 2-3 more clicks.

Even worse, this thread is full of armchair lawyers

...

Any actual lawyer would tell you

Assuming you're not yourself a lawyer, doesn't speculating about what an actual lawyer would say or do make you an armchair lawyer?

No one only needs to be familiar with lawyers themselves to speculate about what they might do. They are a cautious bunch. This is distinct from dispensing legal advice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com