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Comment by zetanor | Hacker News Reader

The near-ubiquitous malicious compliance that took place during the implementation of GDPR (i.e., displaying consent modals instead of just not sending visitors' personal information to 93 third party services) at least had the benefit of bringing to light just how much web service providers view their users as things to be bought and sold. I doubt that text watermarking will result in much of anything at all, besides additional expense.

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Is https://www.europa.eu also malicious compliance? Because what on earth does the EU commission need a cookie pop up for?

And yet there it is. Maybe the law is flawed?

There are YouTube videos embedded in some eu pages.

It is indeed malicious compliance: https://european-union.europa.eu/cookies_en

I have to assume that this is the work of some contractor (Intracom?). Every cookie could be removed (analytics, etc.; and does europa.eu really need to embed a dozen of American services instead of just using <video>?), and the necessary ones could be consented to at the point of creation without any general interruption ("[ ] Remember Me (stores a 30-day cookie)" during the login flow).

I keep saying: its worse than that. Companies that actually do not need to ask for consent do - because their compliance departments prefer to play it safe. My current employer genuinely does not share any data with anyone, the only stuff we process is for our own technical purposes, very well within the remit of GDPR. But year after year, a chief data privacy officer after chief data privacy officer, I lose the battle for "lets get rid of the obnoxious cookie consent banner, we dont need it". All big companies are like that.

And of course, cookies are no longer needed for invasive tracking, fingerprinting, and data disaggregation. Been this for years. But hey, bureaucracies never backtrack, so we will have the cookie consent until the thermal death of the universe.

> And of course, cookies are no longer needed for invasive tracking, fingerprinting, and data disaggregation. Been this for years. But hey, bureaucracies never backtrack, so we will have the cookie consent until the thermal death of the universe.

The exact method of tracking doesn't matter. Under GDPR you have to ask for consent no matter the technology used. So as long as tracking every single movement remains the norm, we will have consent banners

Worth knowing cookies are a special case and are covered under the ePrivacy directive, which is distinct from the wider GDPR legislation and specifically deals with storing tracking information in a user's browser.

This is also malicious compliance.

The whole effort started as a way to pin point which work openAI stole from! Now they are redirecting the dicussion to "our sources are magic. let's talk about who is copying from that magic".

All the controversy about this being pointless, is on purpose. They are pushing the pointless thing as a distraction and we keep discussing how pointless it is. no wonder.

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