Hacker News Reader

Comment by DarkWiiPlayer | Hacker News Reader

The cookie banners are largely a cargo cult and don't have to be nearly as annoying as they are.

Websites just love to say "we have to do this" rather than improve their UX because the latter just means more work while the former gets people to be wrongfully upset at GDPR.

View on HN

I think cookie banners are a not-so-subtle sabotage of the GDPR. The more annoyance they can associate with GDPR the more the customers will want to water it down. And bonus, it's completely deniable.

And it's largely working. Even on a site like HN where you'd expect people to be educated about this stuff, we have people claiming that GDPR (and not their own data collection practices) forces them to pop up a cookie banner.

On a site like HN you'd expect a significant proportion of people to be willfully ignorant and/or make excuses about this stuff because it helps them sleep at night.

I have been suspecting for a while that the "consent" escape hatch was a concession to get GDPR past the advertising industry's army of lobbyists. Making the problem in-your-face-visible is hopefully only the first step in garnering support from the public. It's much easier for a politician to point to all the obnoxious pop-ups and say "look at this despicable behavior! These companies choose to nag you at every opportunity because abusing your privacy makes them a couple cents. They should just not be allowed to do that."

Nah, next step would be to pull the UX noose tighter and tighter, limiting things like number of clicks to reject non-essential cookies, restricting data loss (like if you already filled in some form data, etc.), maybe even limiting how much of the screen they're allowed to take until the user clicks on "read more" or whatever, etc.

I don't think this is necessarily going to happen, but that would be the reasonable next step from where we are now: boiling the advertiser frog slowly and with changes that users would consider uncontroversially positive.

Silicon Valley has such an antagonistic view of user consent and user control, and when they're forced to acknowledge and respect it, they do it in the most tantrum-y, malicious-compliance way they can. It's like the Bob's Burgers meme: "OK, Fine. But I'm gonna complain the whole time."

Ironically, if these companies didn't choose to make their consent UX so deliberately hostile and in-your-face, we might never have had this much visibility into how big of a problem it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com