If you like things the way they were before the law, just answer yes to all cookie banners you see.
It does not take time if you don’t care to read it. Yours click yes, and they will remember you want to be tracked.
It does not take time if you don’t care to read it. Yours click yes, and they will remember you want to be tracked.
Back in the day browsers offered this natively. When the advertising companies started building browsers there was a lot of incentive to see that go by the wayside of course...
But the earlier comment isn't saying that you shouldn't have options, rather that the law needs to be more specific, such as requiring browsers to work in coordination with website operators to provide a unified solution that is agreeable to users instead of leaving it completely wide open to malicious compliance.
These kind of laws need to be careful to not stifle true innovation, so it is understandable why it wanted to remain wide open at the onset. But, now that we're in the thick of it, maybe there is a point where we can agree that popup dialogs that are purposefully designed to be annoying are in volition of the spirit and that the law should be amended to force a better solution?
1. The law isn't about browsers or websites. It equally applies to all tracking. E.g. in apps. Or in physical stores.
2. The world's largest advertising company could do all you describe. And they do work with websites. First by repackaging tracking through FLoC. Then by just simply repackaging tracking and calling it privacy: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923
Obviously. And where there are problems in those domains equal specificity would be asked for. But since we're talking about in the context of browsers specifically...
... then we all know it only cookies that matter? I don't understand the ellipsis
Oh look. Here's what I wrote:
--- start quote ---
The law isn't about browsers or websites. It equally applies to all tracking. E.g. in apps. Or in physical stores.
--- end quote ---
> But what does matter was already discussed. Are you reading comments in complete isolation again or what? There is a context that has been built up.
This is literally the only thread around your comment. There are dozens of other discussions, yes. I was specifically replying to your comment, and expecting replies within the context of your comment.
A historical law that hasn't had anything to do with the discussion since conception isn't about browsers, but the discussion about how future laws might improve upon 'malicious' use of browsers is. Said 'malicious' use of browser isn't about cookies, though, so such a new law would not be written about cookies anyway, so where do you think cookies even fit?
> I was specifically replying to your comment
You replied to it in a mechanical sense. But you did not reply to the content of it. And now are apparently doubling down on that even after it was brought to your attention...
In practice these banners regularly break. They are hard to click on certain devices where the button is off screen. If they use JavaScript and there is an error elsewhere, you can’t hide them. And I regularly see them over and over again on the same sites because for some reason they can’t track me effectively for this purpose.
In short they are a regular minor annoyance that does take time and effort.
Other people already get two choices to make here which they didn't get before, which is a win in my book. Seeing the banner, you can decide to avoid the website and if you still wanna use the website, you can chose if you allow them to track you by PII or not.
Also, I am an educated consumer and understand what a cookie is. Most people do not and do whatever is necessary to make the consent screen go away. Because of that, effectively they don't get this choice.
As one of the parent posts said, if it was implemented on the browser level, I would get the choice, and the cost of making the right choice would be smaller. If the defaults were to "reject unnecessary cookies" then most of the population would get the benefit.
The way it is right now feels like a net negative. Most people don't know what the consent is about and will not spend the time to learn it. Companies still find ways to track you that agrees with the letter but not the spirit of the law. I have friction whenever visiting a new website (or an old one that forgot my choice). The only winners are people who don't value their time and are smart enough to understand cookie consent. That's a small percentage of the general population.
That's because the tracking is a net negative.
It doesn’t matter what site I visit and what choice I do. The next day, every single website asks me to pass through the banners again.
There's a reason people have always hated popup ads even though "just close them" has always been an option.
I have seen a ton of these ads in the past few years.
All these laws have done is created a ton of wealth for lawyers.
The more obnoxious the cookie banner, the quicker you can conclude "I didn't really need to visit your site anyway".
If you want to operate an ad-supported site, you need that consent. Untargeted ads are pointless and they don't make money. If you disagree, can I interest you in some brake pads for a Toyota Corolla? How about a dental chew for elderly cats? No? ok.
If you operate an e-commerce site or a SaaS of some kind, you probably need to advertise it online. To have traffic land on your site from advertising, you need to have ad network 'pixels' on your site. That's what they require. If you won't comply, then you can't advertise and you probably can't get many customers.
Websites which need neither are called "hobby sites." I'm very happy for the personal blogs which use no analytics, have no need to remember anyone or collect any "data." The sites showing the cookie banners are not that. They need to make money in order to exist.
Why didn’t you instead suggest server space or a novel automation tool? You know, things relevant to people visiting HN.
That’s how untargeted ads work. You don’t simply advertise anything anywhere, you advertise relevant things to relevant communities. Advertise the break pads on a community of car enthusiasts and the cat chew on pet forums.
It's not cookie banners that are wasting productivity, it's mutual distrust and the need to protect against it. "Cookie banners" (or more correctly: consent forms) are legal contracts. The reason they are often so annoying to navigate is that the companies that built them want to try to trick you into agreeing to things you have no interest in agreeing to or might even have an interest in not agreeing to. Technically the law forbids this but it's still more profitable to risk the fine than to abide by the law.
Or to put it another way: there's no honest reason to require a consent form to let you read an article. The consent form isn't for reading the article, it's for what the site wants to do to you (or your data - which includes all data collected about you because the GDPR defines that as being yours, too) while you're reading the article.
The GDPR doesn't make you waste time on cookie banners. The GDPR grants you ownership of all personally identifiable information of you and about you - it creates legal rights and protections you previously didn't have. Cookie banners exist because companies want to infringe upon those rights. Most cookie banners are difficult to navigate because most companies don't want you to understand what you're agreeing to (and on second order because they want you to blame the law granting you rights rather than them for infringing upon those rights).
Respectfully, this is untrue. The article is there because of the ads that pay the bills. Without ads there is no article and no site. Without consent, under these laws, the ads can only be useless ads that no advertiser wants to pay for, which means they either can't sell the ad space at all, or have to sell it for $0.0001 CPM hoping that like, Coca Cola will want to just remind the readers that Coke exists and not care too much if anyone even clicks it.
When behavioral targeted advertising was new, it vastly outperformed previous ad networks which used a spray-and-pray approach and paid by impressions. In the years (decades?) since, the payouts for behavioral targeted advertising have dropped significantly. "Untargeted" ads on the other hand have mostly vanished simply because the ad networks that used them have moved on to behavioral ads where they had to compete with mass data harvesters like Alphabet and Meta, mostly unsuccessfully.
Behavioral targeted advertising also doesn't live up to its promise for consumers. Nowadays most actual ads people get are either trying to sell products they already purchased or outright fraud - the rest is the same generic drivel that you would expect without targeted advertising. The reduction in tracking surface from sites that don't require these ads to operate (e.g. sites that previously fed into networks like Google's via unrelated services that can now no longer be legally used for that purpose and require opt-in) also means the targeting will become increasingly worse.
The GDPR does allow for making behavioral ads conditional to accessing content, by the way. But it requires providing the user with the option to instead pay for the content. The problem a lot of companies like Meta run into is that it also requires the price to be proportionate to the lost advertising revenue - Meta is infamous for having priced its "ad-free" tier orders of magnitude higher than their actual value of an individual user.
That said, what is killing this kind of site isn't users deciding not to give away their data but services like Google scraping their content and pre-empting user traffic to their websites entirely - first via news feeds and search summaries and now via "AI enhanced search". The ad-driven business model is dying and has been dying for a long time, the GDPR just puts limits on what can replace it. Google wasn't paying sites because it wanted to sell ads, Google was paying sites because it needed access to their users' data.
Rights don't make sense without bureaucracy because they only have meaning when you deal with them at that layer of abstraction. You can't respect and infringe "rights" interpersonally. You can act ethically or unethically, you can be nice or a bit of a dick, you can harm or help. But rights only become necessary as a concept when you have processes that need to interact with them and abstract entities that uphold and enforce them. Rights allow you to sue or call the police. But without rights you can't have capitalism. States enforce property rights literally at the end of a gun (and this includes "state property" too in case you were wondering about so-called "communist" states).