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Comment by snehk | Hacker News Reader

The whole law should have been forcing sites to not ignore DoNotTrack bworser settings. It's a prime example of the EU being utterly useless because they don't understand the underlying issue and then choose a "solution" that's as much in your face as possible but doesn't change anything about the original problem. It's the whole plastic straw thing in digital form.

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No, it's not a prime example of the EU being utterly useless. It's a prime example of companies engaging in shady practises. This is what all the websites should have done: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/no-cookie-for...

Quote from the blog post:

> Well, EU law requires you to use cookie banners if your website contains cookies that are not required for it to work.

It is quite ironic to get a cookie banner on tat page.

And disappointing.

Hopefully that doesn't mean my blog, currently hosted on github, is getting them again — those popups were one reason I moved away from Wordpress (well before the latest drama).

If only those websites just didn't use cookies when 99% of them don't need them. Easy to display the cookie terror banner and blame the EU while you're using it for "analytics".

And the majority isn't even compliant, without a big disable button, instead hiding it through 10 different dark patterns in the cookie setting, where every misclick leads to accepting the whole array of spyware.

Its lazy engineering. Most sites dont need such functionality, but devs are either incompetent to rip it out of libraries they use, are stuck in web design patterns from 20 years ago themselves or its a simple business decision to trade user data. When was the last time you really needed cookies for your business and couldnt get around it with (usually better) tech?

Dont blame the system (nonideal but darn good to be in place, compared to literally rest of the world where humans have simply less rights), when its companies failing knowingly basic rules.

This, exactly.

And possibly requiring browser vendors to implement Do Not Track in an accessible and user-friendly way. (Those whose business models are reliant on ads might need a firm nudge there.)

I don't think DNT settings were not considered – they were probably discarded as they hurt user privacy. Fingerprinting tools use the DNT setting as an extra flag to identify the user, so having it set to a non-default means you actually get tracked more, not less.

The cookie banners still have to be implemented somehow. I dont think there is a difference in the amount of tracking here.

My point is that if the tracking settings came from the browser whether it was DNT or another one, they would actually be used to track people more effectively by bad actors

> It's a prime example of the EU being utterly useless

That's a bold statement to claim that the largest trade block in the world is utterly useless, but I'll bite it.

What was the underlying issue they didn't understand?

That companies will go with malicious compliance 9999 times out of 10,000. So ensuring compliance would require immense enforcement efforts from the get-go that still haven't really surfaced.

Where are you getting this information from?

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