Also by the EU users losing access to ad-supported free services.
Says who?! I have zero problems sending my private data to the US. I did it for years and I still think is one of the better places to send my private data to. Definitely better than my own country.
> Free content and services. What do you lose in exchange?
Privacy. What I do shouldn't really be anybody else's business.
An ad-targeted web. IMO ads are a plague on useful content, because everything is about getting views and clicks. This makes actual content less useful and more annoying to consume. It incentivizes posting low effort, watered down content rather than smaller amounts of great content. It also means content creators are trying to please the advertiser, and not me.
Risk of manipulation. Lots of effort has gone into figuring out how to best manipulate people, and when you know who somebody is and how to best tailor any given message to them, you can get pretty far. I'm quite sure that I also have buttons that can be pushed if somebody knows how, and I don't particularly like the thought of that.
And why the heck would I want to give my data to a bunch of random companies? What's the benefit in it for me, anyway?
Free content and services. What do you lose in exchange?
EU bureaucrats are effectively prescribing how the web should work for everyone. Ridiculous.
But a fundamental issue with freedom is that sometimes freedoms conflict with each other. Here the freedom to do whatever you want conflicts with the right to privacy of others and the EU has decided that in this instance the right to privace takes precedence.
I am not free to use a website and give away "my data" by default without having to click Allow All on a damn cookie popup.
The EU politicians unilaterally decided to steal these freedoms from all EU citizens.
The right to privacy is not a freedom. I am not sure it's even a real right. But it was easily accessible even before the current privacy laws, even if it needed a little technical competence. It wasn't the default though. And the current laws do not provide me the privacy I actually need: from EU government(s).
Those companies are free to not to do business wit you but it is not the EU privacy laws making that decision. Those companies can provide their service in a privacy-respecting way and many will - the EU is not a small market to give up on. You can also use a VPN.
> I am not free to use a website and give away "my data" by default without having to click Allow All on a damn cookie popup.
You think users should need to be technically competent to block cookies but don't want to be technically competent to install an extension like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...
And don't forget that hose consent popups are likely specifically designed to be annoying in order to get you mad at the privacy laws. Don't fall for it - the EU privacy laws do not required websites to be user-unfriendly.
> The EU politicians unilaterally decided to steal these freedoms from all EU citizens.
I am not going to pretend the EU is a perfect democracy, but ultimately, those decisions are made by those elected by the peole - directly or indirectly.
> The right to privacy is not a freedom. I am not sure it's even a real right.
It is a real right that has historically been enforced in many EU countries. The recent laws do nothing more than update that enforcement to the digital age.
> But it was easily accessible even before the current privacy laws, even if it needed a little technical competence.
No, it really wasn't. You can block cookies but you cannot stop companies from tracking you via the 10 million other ways they have available or to trade information about you with third parties. You cannot use technical means to find out what information companies have collected about you. You cannot use technical means to compel companies to delete information they have already collected. THAT is why we have new laws.
I feel for my European brothers and sisters these days. As an American, I hardly ever see these banners. Went to an EU country for work and... Holy cow. Y'all get these banners every site. How do you tolerate it?
Thanks to GDPR, we have a much more private web. /s
Yes, I think we're in a vastly better place, where there is a cost to doing bad things.
Good for Europe, they are just going to law themselves out of the internet. Up to the point were your ISP doing hops to send your TCP packet will be illegal unless you approve them sharing that info with all the shops.
/s
(Also, the GDPR is not responsible for cookie banners)
The market responding to the law with billions of cookie banners was as predictable as prohibition leading to bootlegging.
And now the regulators are responding to it.[0]
[0] https://www.iccl.ie/news/gdpr-enforcer-rules-that-iab-europe...
The predictable outcome from that ruling is a decentralized solution: a few libraries attempting to build frameworks that are compliant, everyone implementing their own one-off versions of permission-granting and cookie consent using those frmeworks as a basis, and the Authority chasing mom-and-pop sites that are out of compliance until the sun goes cold.
In a sense, that may satisfy the goals: the data will be decentralized, stored widely, and harder to aggregate. On the other hand, what we learned from the virus era and the Windows OS monoculture is thousands of nodes running the same software (but not centrally maintained; maintained by people who have a job other than maintaining a website and are therefore slow to patch security holes) will be vulnerable to scripted attacks against frameworks.
My prediction is a net increase in stolen PII and, while individual site-runners will get screwed, the number of sites collecting the data won't go down. It's just too valuable, and the odds you will get hit by a hacker are too low.
In any case, it'll be a hell of a ride.