Re:Can the horrendous cookie banner by the EU be rolled back?
by rektide on Monday April 04, 2022 @10:54AM
(#30907352)
> It's really a very reasonable rule. Before you use somebody else's computer you have to ask for permission.
Your own example of a cryptominer shows how incorrect your idealized statement is: there is nothing to prevent websites from running cryptominers. Some do. It's not illegal.
This idea of consent is idealized & fluffy & sounds neat & compact, but every time we open a website we are letting sandboxed but fairly arbitrary code run, code that can talk to & connect to a huge amount of othrr systems (CORS permitting).
The flipside is that it's your browser, your useragent. You are free to write extensions or disable javascript or block images or block 3rd party traffic or whatever.
And that kind of brings me around to cookies & the EU mandate here. Im not sure why a human interface here splashed on each page is at all a good thing. This is the sort of approach to the problem I'd expect from people who have no grasp of technology no sense of what is possible. Earlier approaches like Do Not Track[1] provided a far more concise & less disruptive general alternative . Or perhaps we could say cookies need markup as to their purpose, create some categories, & such that we can build browsers that can execute our preferences more elegantly. We could have created a new web api that sites serving EU citizens had to implement, to better enable the browser.
The crime of ePrivacy is that it specifies a solution which must be entirely in-band to the page. The media has to advertise it's privacy capabilities, a user has to go through custom, ah-hoc, non-standard dialogs proprietary to each site. Mandating any kind of out-of-band / machine-to-machine interface here would have done so much to prevent this obnoxious trashy low-quality muck we are now mired in. It's cheap & distracting & clicking through to secure your rights is a pointless ritual. This solution sucks. I agree it's a good that's enabled, but this is a trashy mandate, and it's significantly increased the trashfire feel of the web. It was imminently avoidable, better was so close at hand, but the lawmakers didnt seem to have any real grasp or vision of what they were up to or would create.
Your own example of a cryptominer shows how incorrect your idealized statement is: there is nothing to prevent websites from running cryptominers. Some do. It's not illegal.
This idea of consent is idealized & fluffy & sounds neat & compact, but every time we open a website we are letting sandboxed but fairly arbitrary code run, code that can talk to & connect to a huge amount of othrr systems (CORS permitting).
The flipside is that it's your browser, your useragent. You are free to write extensions or disable javascript or block images or block 3rd party traffic or whatever.
And that kind of brings me around to cookies & the EU mandate here. Im not sure why a human interface here splashed on each page is at all a good thing. This is the sort of approach to the problem I'd expect from people who have no grasp of technology no sense of what is possible. Earlier approaches like Do Not Track[1] provided a far more concise & less disruptive general alternative . Or perhaps we could say cookies need markup as to their purpose, create some categories, & such that we can build browsers that can execute our preferences more elegantly. We could have created a new web api that sites serving EU citizens had to implement, to better enable the browser.
The crime of ePrivacy is that it specifies a solution which must be entirely in-band to the page. The media has to advertise it's privacy capabilities, a user has to go through custom, ah-hoc, non-standard dialogs proprietary to each site. Mandating any kind of out-of-band / machine-to-machine interface here would have done so much to prevent this obnoxious trashy low-quality muck we are now mired in. It's cheap & distracting & clicking through to secure your rights is a pointless ritual. This solution sucks. I agree it's a good that's enabled, but this is a trashy mandate, and it's significantly increased the trashfire feel of the web. It was imminently avoidable, better was so close at hand, but the lawmakers didnt seem to have any real grasp or vision of what they were up to or would create.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track