Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

This! Personally I feel overwhelmed by dialog boxes and other trash content that gets in the way of content I need to see to do my tasks.

I want to see somebody punished whenever something appears. I'd like to see the EU legislators who gave us these GDPR popups treated like war criminals and jailed if they leave the EU (e.g. they've cost us billions in productivity) I'd like to see harsh treatment for those discriminatory and accessibility-violating "click on the traffic lights" popups, that stupid anime girl who is on way too many open source web sites, etc.

And I think apps that show one of those nags should be kicked immediately out of the app store.

View on HN

> that stupid anime girl who is on way too many open source web sites

I assume you're referring to https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis. As I understand, this is a tool for blocking bot traffic and is sometimes used as DDOS protection. In my experience it's less obtrusive than Cloudflare, and it's open source and competes with Cloudflare's near monopoly on DDOS protection. I don't think we should be discouraging people from protecting their sites from unwanted traffic.

> I'd like to see the EU legislators who gave us these GDPR popups…

The tracking industry's endless abuses gave you those popups, and they're deliberately implemented to be as annoying as possible to make you say things like the above.

It could have been "respect DNT or go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200". Instead we got American-style legalistic consentualism.

My experience as a web developer since 1995 or so is I was able to push back on pop-ups, pop-overs and stuff like that as being user hostile. Than the GDPR breaks the dam, it normalizes the idea of interrupting the user over bullshit, it is not "annoying" anymore, now it is "required" or "socially positive" and now you visit some blog and there are three different popups asking for your email.

The GDPR required an action by those performing intrusive tracking. Popups was one possible action.

Less intrusive tracking is an option! Opt-in tracking is an option! Not tracking is an option! I don't track anything on my personal sites, and I push back on anything at work that'd make me add a banner as hard as I possibly can.

Yeah they could have just not tracked by default. They could have just respected DNT. I mean it’s right there already built into the browser.

(And browsers could have set DNT by default).

But of course no website is going to do that.

I actually like the pop ups because they often show all the trackers used in a list of “our partners”. Many big websites have hundreds of these tracking companies listed as partners. It’s shocking. And a useful reminder of why web privacy matters and that if you don’t fight for it they will take everything they can just to squeeze out every last fraction of a penny from you and your data/privacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com