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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

I'm generally pro-EU but they sure know how to not fix things by annoying people as much as possible. C.f. the cookie laws, headphone volume warnings, etc.

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I understand the spirit of the law, but any implementation by the EU feels like making a wish to a monkey paw these day. I would love for people to stop watching tiktoks on their phones while driving on the motorway, but the implementation means that I now get to be constantly distracted by my own car while driving.

I'm really surprised that there hasn't been a requirement for phone screens to not turn on over 10mph and gps located on a road

Passengers about to get bored out of their minds..... And car infotainment subscription plans love it!

passenger seats already have an occupancy sensor that you could probably hook into to make a passenger seat bypass somehow.

don't get me wrong, this would probably be horribly unpopular, but otoh deaths from cars are up ~50% in the last decade, bringing us back to ~1985 in car safety. Something fairly drastic is needed

Amount of driven kilometers are also up massively compared to 1985, meaning that per kilometer we did fine on the safety record.

Stop trying to make cars safer, and reduce the amount of driving you need to do. There is a way to have more liberties and have it improve safety instead of fewer. The liberty to commute, do groceries, and go to the gym by bike is huge life improvement, whilst taking nothing away in terms of car liberties.

Cookie dialogs easily avoided wherever companies care about their customers/users.

Is this the sort of naive reasoning that led to the law in the first place?

The EU didn't force the banners. They restricted opt-out data collection without consent, which is a good thing to do. The banners is malicious compliance.

And what lead to the banners is the knowledge that people like you would blame the law instead of the companies.

And they are getting better. I don't remember when was the last time a cookie dialogue forced me to uncheck 10+ switches, and making me angry that they give my browsing history to 1000+ random ad companies--I unironically miss that daily dosage of anger (against ad people and not the EU).

Most of them are one-click nowadays, just as intended. (Still bad on phones tho, especially javascript disabled.)

Yeah now they say "accept all or subscribe". Much better!

Example?

The Guardian does this now.

There has been a lawsuit over that, I've not heard of its result yet.

https://commission.europa.eu/index_en : cookie banner.

Can you find any big sites that don't have one? They're effectively a mandatory CYA, the Prop 65 warning of websites.

About the only thing they've gotten right recently was forcing Apple to switch to USB-C.

Even that only moved up Apple’s timetable for switching by a year or two.

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