Hacker News Reader

Comment by crubier | Hacker News Reader

> Just make people click something every once in a while

But why? This is EU Cookies Banner level of state interference making UX worse for everyone just because some lawmaker doesn't like something.

View on HN

"Some lawmaker" is democracy. The point is that people are pissed off about the addictive UX, same as cigarettes, and candy. If you want to make a serious argument, just argue that you should be able to opt out, which is an entirely reasonable position.

Democracy is bound by the limits of the Constitution, outside of an amendment or a revolution. (Note that the latter is usually considered a Bad Thing; occasionally it works out for the better, but just as often for the worse.)

the EU doesn't have a constitution

It does, it's just not the US constitution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaties_of_the_European_Union

Right, it has a set of treaties, not a unified constitution. And there have been a number of cases in which member state laws clashed with EU laws:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law

Is CA in the US or the EU?

Didn’t think so, and we didn’t ask for your opinion

> This is EU Cookies Banner level of state interference making UX worse for everyone

A couple of comments up in this thread.

As many have said before:

  it's basically malicious compliance. They're supposed to be super annoying ... Instead of complying, they choose this obnoxious practice so they could continue ... monitoring every action a visitor does.

  You don't need a cookie banner to be allowed to create Cookies. You only need them if you're using them for something like tracking. [1]

  Regulators didn't enforce cookie banners. Cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance. When you complain about them, you are doing the lobbying work of ad companies for free. The correct solution is to just not spy on people, and the problem is that the EU didn't go far enough and just ban the behavior altogether. [2]

  Cookie pops are malicious compliance to regulations that legitimately protect consumers. You’ve cherry picked one bad side effect to throw out all the ways the EU is way ahead of anyone else in protecting consumers [3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29529148

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38299135

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46552795

The EU Council are some of the worst offenders when it comes to annoying cookie banners. All regulation and compliance do is make things more burdensome for new entrants, which inevitably allows big companies to build moats that don't have competition. The side effect of passing such legislation was easily foreseeable and yet the EU did it anyway. There are legitimate reasons for companies to track and if you felt that the tracking was malicious, then don't do business with the company. The regulation was never needed.

For one, compliance is compliance. For another, "You only need them if you're using them for something like tracking." yeah, sites want to track user behavior and the eu said if you want to do that you gotta have a banner. How is that "malicious"? Seems like the eu got exactly what they wanted?

> and the eu said if you want to do that you gotta have a banner.

No they did absolutely not say that! They said I need informed consent before I collect your personal identifiable information. Nothing prevents me from instead of using a banner, for example having a small widget in the footer or elsewhere on my site if I were to want to collect it (I have no analytics or cookies on my site at all).

> for example having a small widget in the footer or elsewhere on my site

And next thing you know, there'd be people complaining about "dark patterns" where the small widget is designed to be very easy to overlook and (more importantly) someone may inadvertently use the site briefly before noticing that they can turn off tracking. Whoops, you just got tracked.

A modal makes it obvious what's happening on the site and gives you a chance to opt-out before proceeding. There really is no better way to do it that's going keep everyone happy. People just don't want to admit that the only way to properly implement this feature is to annoy people.

I can’t emphasise enough how much you are missing the point of the law! The law requires me to NOT track you unless I get specific, informed, consent.

The fundamental and default part of the law is to NOT track. Tracking by default (opt-out) is illegal. A modal is just a way to annoy you until you consent against your will.

https://gdpr.eu/article-6-how-to-process-personal-data-legal...

> unless I get specific, informed, consent.

Explain how you'd do that without a banner or similarly annoying UX

I don’t know where to begin explaining UX to someone who struggles with the basic concept of consent.

It’s simple, informing implies taking screen space, expressing consent implies user action. So overall it HAS to be similarly annoying to a cookie banner.

Of course if your answer is “people should just stop using cookies” then I have bad news for you.

I want to decline a websites ability to track my behavior and/or decline that they pass the data to another company. Most websites allow me to decline it. I prefer to have to opt in which is a minor inconvenience - then not having the option at all. Also the banners we got are deliberately bad and cumbersome so people just click on allow.

When it came time for website owners to decide whether they (1) would remove unnecessary cookies, (2) receive consent from their users for extra cookies via reasonable banners, or (3) circumvent consent from their users for extra cookies via dark-patterned banners...

... virtually no website owners opted for (1), a minority opted for (2), and most opted for (3). Yet every technolibertarian thinks (3) is the law's doing and not the consequence of other technolibertarians.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com