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Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by vruiz on Saturday September 26, 2015 @08:01AM (#10282851)
Even assuming that law was necessary (debatable), the idiotic thing was asking millions of websites to do this, instead of automatically in a handful of browsers. Not to mention absurdities like the fact that you need cookies to remember that the user doesn't want cookies, or even worse: https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/633551359774691328
Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by blub on Saturday September 26, 2015 @08:32AM (#10282924)
Perhaps something is deeply wrong with the way companies approach the internet if millions of them have to display a notice that they are tracking their users.
Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by vruiz on Saturday September 26, 2015 @08:41AM (#10282949)
No, I can see that you are not familiar with the law, I don't blame you because nobody is, since it's incredibly vague about when applies and AFAIK nobody has yet been fined. There are hundreds of companies doing wrong things, no doubt. The "millions" are collateral damage.
Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by blub on Saturday September 26, 2015 @08:53AM (#10282970)
I am basing my statements on http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm (the chapter EU legislation on cookies). According to this guide, the following cokies are exempt from consent: user-input (forms, shopping carts), authentication (for the session), user-centric security, multimedia player, ui customization, social network for logged in members.

Seems quite straightforward and fair.

Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by vruiz on Saturday September 26, 2015 @09:14AM (#10283011)
No it's neither straightforward nor fair. Because it's a whitelist (and a short one), not a blacklist. You can not legislate like that, making potentially illegal any use case that you could have missed or any future use case.

And there is plenty of legitimate usages that are not whitelisted. The most notorious is non-shared traffic analysis. Meaning what basic google-analytics offers and half of the internet uses. There is absolutely nothing wrong with knowing how many unique visitors you got today, and everyone with a website wants to know that.

Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by TeMPOraL on Saturday September 26, 2015 @10:17AM (#10283149)
> There is absolutely nothing wrong with knowing how many unique visitors you got today, and everyone with a website wants to know that.

Maybe people running those websites want to know that, but as a visitor, I might not want that. Being ablet o tell "how many unique visitors you got today" implies that you can group actions by unique visitors, and thus tell e.g. exactly what I was doing on your website over the course of days. If I'm not logged in, I might not want that.

And don't get me wrong - I'm not really a strong privacy advocate or something. Most of the time I don't care much about tracking. But while in theory there's nothing wrong in tracking unique visits, we all know that the primary use of this is to manipulate users and shit ads on them, nowadays mostly cross-site. It's entirely reasonable people get fed up of being on the receiving end of someone else's malice.

Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by vruiz on Saturday September 26, 2015 @10:29AM (#10283179)
> Maybe people running those websites want to know that, but as a visitor, I might not want that. Being ablet o tell "how many unique visitors you got today" implies that you can group actions by unique visitors, and thus tell e.g. exactly what I was doing on your website over the course of days. If I'm not logged in, I might not want that.

That's like asking the guy behind the counter in a shop to not look at you because as long as you are not buying anything you don't want him to know you are there. You are entitled to your feelings but if you don't want to be seen don't go there, or care enough to open an incognito window.

> But while in theory there's nothing wrong in tracking unique visits, we all know that the primary use of this is to manipulate users and shit ads on them, nowadays mostly cross-site.

No, primary use is regular analytics. 99.9% of websites on the internet are not amazon. And if the law was for cross-site information sharing cookies then this would be a totally different debate, but it is not.

Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by ino on Saturday September 26, 2015 @09:47AM (#10283089)
What are the best server side only alternatives to google analytics?
Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by vruiz on Saturday September 26, 2015 @10:18AM (#10283150)
Without cookies you can not measure anything but IPs, and IPs are meaningless. You can not count unique users because in a given office you get 50 people/IP. You can not count new/recurrent users because most ISPs don't offer fixed IPs.
Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by glomph on Saturday September 26, 2015 @08:39AM (#10282939)
The law is only about tracking cookies not all cookies.
Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by cornewut on Saturday September 26, 2015 @08:13AM (#10282879)
I don't think the law specifies to use cookies to disable cookies and it's a good thing - lawmakers shouldn't care about technological solutions.
Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by dchest on Saturday September 26, 2015 @09:16AM (#10283016)
Thanks, I don't want people who make these stupid laws instead regulate how my browser behaves.
Re:Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock by vruiz on Saturday September 26, 2015 @09:27AM (#10283035)
me neither but, assuming that you _had_ to choose, why not? As a user: you get a single standard non-intrusive message you can disable (like remember password). As a website you have one less problem.