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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Policy making assumed good faith actors - specifically that tracking outside of necessary for website to function to be minimal. Because like…not necessary.

It’s only broken to the extent that it collided with a messed up world where websites track even when they don’t need to and then send that to 2000 partners for more profit extraction on top of what the website does commercially.

Something is deeply fucked up there and it’s not the EU part. They just make a good scapegoat because the banner is what users see

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Policy should never assume good faith actors. There wouldn't need to be policy if an assumption of good faith was a valid substrate for the policy. The policy is bad because its authors built it in a vacuum, without any thought or care put towards how its compliance would actually instatiate. This is a consistent problem with EU regulators. The 'tax' the policy levies on invasive cookie use (which I agree is broken and horrific) is forwarded to the user, via this terrible, omnipresent popup. The policy has made the problem worse, by further densensitizing humanity at large to this terrible practice. Shameful behavior by EU regulators and they should absolutely be pilloried for the present state.

> Policy making assumed good faith actors

Let's not paint the policymakers naïve when they're in fact incompetent.

They are not incompetent in general. Most stuff works pretty well in Europe and better than in most of the world. We just focus on the bad regulations

>Most stuff works pretty well in Europe

Bold thing to say.

t. European

Not really Bold, yes GDP per capita is lower in many countries than the US, but top tier in almost every other index: low crime rates, clean cities, high quality of living, childfriendliness, longevity, access to healthcare, liveable cities, culture, etc.

Let’s not paint the policymakers incompetent when they’re in fact naive

If you think about it, a naïve policy maker isn't competent.

So, let’s not paint them as <term meaning lacking the combination of knowledge and skill to do a job effectively> when they are in fact <term meaning particularly lacking wisdom, experience, and/or judgement>

Are you sure?

The biggest positive outcome of the whole GDPR affair is that people finally believe me when I say that yes, they are selling your data to thousands of 3rd parties, and no, I'm not making these numbers up or exagerrating at all.

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