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Comment by athenot | Hacker News Reader

You don't need the cookie banner for cookies that are just preferences and don't track users.

Which is why calling it the cookie banner is a diversion tactic by those who are against the privacy assurances of the GPDR. There is absolutely no problem with cookies. The problem is with the tracking.

Our problem is with tracking. Their problem is that other companies are tracking. So let’s stop the other companies from tracking since we can track directly from our browser. GDPR requires cookie banner to scare people into blocking cookies

There, now only our browser can track you and only our ads know your history…

We’ll get the other two to also play along, throw money at them if they refuse, I know our partner Fruit also has a solution in place that we could back-office deal to share data.

You're assuming bad intent where there are multiple other explanations. I call it the cookie banner and I don't run a web site at all (so, I'm not trying to track users as you claim).

You call it the cookie banner because you've been hearing it regularly referred to as the cookie banner. It was the regularization of calling it the cookie banner that confuses people into thinking the issue is about cookies, and not about tracking.

So, by your own admission, calling it the cookie banner is not only "a diversion tactic by those who are against the privacy assurances of the GPDR". My only point is that you were painting with an overly broad brush and saying someone is a bad actor if they call it the cookie banner, which is demonstrably not the case.

I admit nothing, because I am not partaking into contentious argument.

However I could have better phrased my original comment with the word "was" instead of "is".

It's called a cookie banner because only people using cookies to track users need them. If you're using localstorage to track users, informed consent is still required, but nobody does that because cookies are superior for tracking purposes.

> If you're using localstorage to track users [...] but nobody does

I promise you every adtech/surveillance js junk absolutely is dropping values into local storage you remember you.

They are, but without cookies nearly all of the value disappears because there is no way to correlate sessions across domains. If commercesite.com and socialmediasite.com both host a tracking script from analytics.com that sets data in localstorage, there is no way to correlate a user visiting both sites with just the localstorage data alone - they need cookies to establish the connection between what appears to be two distinct users.

Or for cookies that are required for the site to function.

On a company/product website you should still inform users about them for the sake of compliance, but it doesn't have to be an intrusive panel/popup.

> On a company/product website you should still inform users about them for the sake of compliance

No? Github for example doesn't have a cookie banner. If you wanna be informative you can disclose which cookies you're setting, but if they're not used for tracking purposes you don't have to disclose anything.

Also, again, it's not a "cookie" banner, it's a consent banner. The law says nothing about the storage mechanism as it's irrelevant, they list cookies twice as examples of storage mechanisms (and list a few others like localStorage).

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