> this could probably be avoided by extending the sites terms.
Reading the judgement, I don’t think so. Consent is required before exposing the IP address and is must be explicitly given. Terms can help in cases where there is a technical requirement, for example “if you want to watch this embedded video, you must consent to this”, but they won’t save you when you just embed.
For the average user, it's yet another thing to click without thinking, just to be able to visit a page.
> Consent is required before exposing the IP address and is must be explicitly given
There's the crux of the problem, it's difficult to know what to consent for without first displaying the website, so you implicitly give consent for "just the bare minimum", until you accept the rest. This sounds great, but is both an absolute nightmare for website developers (it's not very easy to do, with how the internet was designed, inline scripts, fonts, CDN stylesheets) and for "most" end-users who just expect good defaults and don't want to sign a consent form every time they visit a website.
> For the average user, it's yet another thing to click without thinking, just to be able to visit a page.
And yet, they’re still protected: They’ll click on the video when they want to watch the video, load the like button when they want to like, the tweet button when they want to tweet. And all the other times when they visit a website that offers any of this functionality, no data is transmitted to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter.
> This sounds great, but is both an absolute nightmare for website developers (it's not very easy to do, with how the internet was designed, inline scripts, fonts, CDN stylesheets
There is no need to ask for consent for every Stylesheet you load from a CDN. You’re allowed to use cloudflare, cloudfront, fastly,… - they’ll all provide the required DPA that allows you to use them without consent. You need to be careful when it comes to things like like-buttons etc. that get loaded from places that use them to create user profiles for non-consenting users. Yes, that’s hard. But the culprits are the entities that siphon up every bit of data. Direct your ire there.
And Google doesn't? (Honest questions)
On first look serving a font from Google and a stylesheet from Cloudflare seem very, very similar things.
AFAIK google fonts does not require any contract. Google could certainly offer a contract, a DPA, etc., assert that they are subject to the GDPR and waive processing of the data they gather from operating google fonts as a service.
Also the late web was designed by guess who: Yes, the ad-spyware companies…
What the EU actually wants to accomplish is to set a standard where people do business in a different (safer/higher quality/more ethical) way[1]; which many believe is both better for consumers and for business.
I wouldn't be surprised if a next round of regulations were to explicitly target (actual or perceived) malicious compliance.
My recommendation would be to find other ways of achieving your technical/advertising objectives that minimize the touching of peoples PII.
[1] This is not unusual, the EU originated as the European Economic [Community/Union], and the regulating of safety, quality and ethics standards between businesses and trading countries has been in their bailiwick for a long time (as behooves a trade treaty organization). Not all kinds of regulation are bad for commerce. This kind promotes fair competition and interoperability, while preventing races to the bottom and tragedies of the commons.
Why single out Germany? Do you have experience doing business there?
When everybody would use it, and ISPs would sell access, that could help the users to regain control over their data, and make privacy on the internet finally first class.
I welcome this idea.
Yes, and that's a good thing! A web page should only communicate with the server i've reached, there should be zero third-party involved unless i explicitly consent.
That for example <img> tag can use an arbitrary URL is explained by the fact that back in the day storage/bandwidth was expensive. The same is true for video to this day, but i guess it's good that heavy-to-load content is click-to-play.
> there should be zero third-party involved unless i explicitly consent.
Hyperlinks are the foundation of the web. However, when we started loading resources (eg. images) from third parties due to high bandwidth/disk cost, we opened a Pandora's box which i believe does more harm than good.
Easiest way to deal with this is to self-host the videos. Most people over-estimate how popular their websites are, and for the ones who don't, getting a dedicated instance with unmetered bandwidth is trivial to get and setup for video-hosting.
In the past when video was a novelty and no one had any real expectation of performance or quality, it didn’t matter much because expectations were low.
But so much work has been done since on reliability/performance/network efficiency and very few products can provide that. Without that work, people will think your player is broken, you will waste mobile traffic, etc. Even Reddit can’t get it right and they are a top 10 website.
Plus YouTube handles all re-encoding and adjust the quality based on the speed and device.
It is possible to do it with open-source components, but it requires a server farm and just not feasible using single cheap private server or VPS.
Now if only browsers would implement native HLS and/or DASH support then every site could have this without having to package a bunch of JS with different quirks of reach site.
Of course, it is not really in Google's interest to help YouTube competitors so this is unlikely to happen for Chrome.
For most videos, this would be a copyright violation. i.e. there are now two laws which prevent reasonable technological solutions, making it harder for most people to host and produce content - favoring the already heavily advantaged big companies.
The solution to bad law is not to ignore it, it's to follow it to the letter, every time. Only then will people sit up take notice, and weigh the tradeoffs. In particular, we've let industry run away with far too much of the public's right to do things.
https://www.yubico.com/?lang=sv