Laws need to be written well to achieve good outcomes. If the law allows for malicious compliance, it is a badly written law.
The sites are just trying to maximize profit, as anyone could predict. So write better laws.
So maybe “malicious compliance” is a misnomer. We should just call it "illegal dark pattern".
> […] the Commission is pondering how to tweak the rules to include more exceptions or make sure users can set their preferences on cookies once (for example, in their browser settings) instead of every time they visit a website.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-cookie-law-messed-up-...
Now the EU just needs to turn it into an actual liability for corporations. Otherwise it will remain as an additional bit of entropy for tracking.
Services should be denied the capacity to track and fingerprint, not just told about a preference against it.
DNT will always be an "evil bit", regardless of any law behind it.
Asking browsers to implement uBlock Origin natively tho...
Its not hard when it comes to any website of note, large companies can't easily hide what their computers are doing really, if they have code that tracks people it is gonna be found.
The story that advertisers don't know what users selected and that somehow allows them to track the user is disingenous.
(and frankly, the number of users that actively want to consent to this is essentially zero)
I always constent to cookie popups so the number can not be 0.
It absolutely will happen if you install uBlock Origin.
People always comment that the internet is "so much nicer" after I install uBlock Origin on their browsers. It's just better, they can't explain why. They don't need to. I know why.
The fact is nobody wants this crap. Ads are nothing but noise in our signal. They're spam. They're content we did not ask for, forced upon us without consent. They do not improve the "experience", at best its impact is minimized.
“Hey what do you think? I dunno, what do you think? How about more tea?!”
Pondering how to tweak, unbelievable.
But yes, I think your take is more realistic as any measure that allows rapid changes also allows willful politics to rapidly make a mess.
> not illegal to annoy the user on every page load
This looks like a contradiction to me.
please read the second half of the clause, kthx
Law making is a way of predicting the future and setting up incentives to achieve a goal. You need to foresee what can go wrong, talk to incumbents and anticipate the response. It's a technical matter and this has been a debacle.
It's useless to put the blame in the advertisers. Even if they're evil, that doesn't make the situation any better for the public.
Who are "they"? The law hasn't changed, it's enforcement that is changing, albeit very slowly.
There are so many institutions that can be rightfully blamed - chiefly the DPAs and the national governments, but your continued insistence on blaming the lawmakers makes no sense. The law is clear, it's just not being enforced.
Of course advertisers deserve all this blame too, but their blame is irrelevant when discussing enforcement. I don't expect them to stop any more than I expect a serial killer to turn themselves in. This is still a failure of the institutions.
It took just a pair of ruling that made it clear this illegal pattern was going to actually be cracked down upon, and now these popups are just a small annoyance rather than the absolutely enraging trap that they were at first.
Of course I still wish they were unnecessary, but they serve as a reminder that these websites are still trying to prey upon their visitors.
Disagree. The popup is the enraging problem. It's not a small annoyance. I click them multiple times every single day and it's ludicrous.
I don't need a "reminder". The last thing I want is some "reminder" day after day after day. I want a law that protects consumers in the first place.
Then don't visit webpages that do illegal things and are hostile to their users.
> I want a law that protects consumers in the first place.
This is that law.
How about you just enforce consumer protections for everyone? Because that is clearly not the law.
Nope. Murder is an action after which the victim can not make any more actions. It would be like saying "don't go to the bakery where they spit in your food and slap you in the face every time you order something". You are enraged by the behavior of the websites you visit and you still keep going there every day. Either you are a masochist or "voting with your wallet" or, in this instance with you attention, doesn't really work. Why do you give your attention to those that treat you like shit?
> How about you just enforce consumer protections for everyone?
They are. What gave you the idea they aren't? Because some pages still behave illegally? You understand that murder still happens?
> Because that is clearly not the law.
Do you know anything about GDPR? Because it seems that you do not. Could you point to the text of the regulation that you object to? I'll wait but I'm sure I'll be waiting for godot here.
What does that have to do with anything? I think you missed my point.
> Why do you give your attention to those that treat you like shit?
Because I have no choice. Every website has these damned popups. Where am I supposed to get my news from otherwise? I mean, what internet do you use...?
> They are. What gave you the idea they aren't?
Because sites are still allowed to track me? Why bother with consent around tracking? Just make it illegal to begin with.
> Do you know anything about GDPR? Because it seems that you do not.
That's inappropriate for HN. Please see the guidelines. Assume good faith.
But in the absence of that? I appreciate at least being asked for my consent so that I can press the "I do not consent to being tracked" button. It shouldn't exist in the first place, but since these websites are unwilling to just not spy on people, this seems like the next best thing.
The vast majority of laws are never enforced, so in practice this isn't as absurd as it sounds. It would make people consider what laws they spend time writing.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Administrative-court-Cookie-ban...
More generally, I actually did organically notice the massive increase in "Reject all" buttons and found out about these court decisions myself some time ago. Certainly a small win for the internet, although it should not have taken 9 years(!) from the implementation of GDPR for these violations of it to be cracked down on.
Also, please remember that in Europe there is no such thing as "the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law." The intent of the law IS the law.
In any case, there is always a difference between the “intent” of a large and diverse body of politicians, and the actual text of a law. Any practical legal system must take it into consideration.
This is a fiction and just an excuse conservative justices use to make conservative rulings when they don't like a law.
They are perfectly fine to abandon the text of the law whenever it doesn't move forward a conservative agenda. The shining example of this is the voting rights act. Something never amended or repealed by congress but slowly dismantled by the court counter to both the intent and the text of the law.
And if you don't believe me, I suggest reading over the Shelby County v. Holder [1] decision because they put it in black and white.
> Nearly 50 years later, they are still in effect; indeed, they have been made more stringent, and are now scheduled to last until 2031. There is no denying, however, that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.
IE "We know the law says this, and it's still supposed to be in effect. But we don't like what it does so we are canceling it based on census data".
Isn't this the other way around? If you cite "the spirit of the law" then you're ignoring the text in order to do whatever you want.
Finding a "conservative" judge who does the latter is evidence that the particular judge is hypocrite rather than any argument that ignoring what the law actually says is the right thing to do.
But you also picked kind of a bad example, because that wasn't a case about how to interpret the law, it was about whether the law was unconstitutional.
Why does the First Amendment say "freedom of speech, or of the press" and make no mention of radio or TV or the internet? Because, of course, it was enacted in 1791. The drafters can't be expected to have listed things that didn't exist yet and it's obvious to everyone that it's meant to apply to this category of things even if we're now using fiber optics and satellites instead of dead trees.
But if you're interpreting a law from 20 years ago instead of 200 and nothing relevant has changed that the drafters couldn't have predicted when it was enacted, the fact that someone is doing what you said instead of what you meant is entirely down to you being bad at saying what you mean and that ought to be on you rather than on them.
I think lots of courts claim this, and none actually do.
One way to do that is to interpret the law strictly according to the text, or in the case of ambiguity to choose the interpretation that benefits the accused rather than the government. Then you could just read the law to know if it prohibits what you want to do, because unless it unambiguously does, then it doesn't. And then if the government doesn't like it once they see someone doing that, it's up to them to change the law.
Another is to give people a way to get clarification ahead of time. This is called advisory opinions and governments generally hate them because as soon as you allow it, the government is going to be absolutely swamped with requests for clarification because everybody wants to pre-clear everything they're going to do rather than take the risk of getting punished for doing something without clearing it. But in order for this to work, getting a clarification has to be cheap, because "pay a million dollars for an advisory opinion to avoid the risk of a million dollar fine" isn't a real solution to the problem of people getting punished when the law is unclear.
So the first one is actually better, the only "problem" with it is that you need the government to be paying attention and promptly rework the law when it isn't having the intended effect, otherwise you'll have people complaining about it because in the meantime there is a dumb law on the books. But if your government is bad at making good laws then you're going to have a bad time no matter what.
A partial solution to this problem is: write laws in a way that need a lot less clarification because there is rarely a need for it because the laws are thought out so well.
Not doing that is a civic duty that I expect from every politician who wants to be considered to be more trustworthy than a child molester who has relapsed several times.
You need something like, ban omnibus bills with a single subject matter rule. Replace first-past-the-post with score voting to dissolve the two-party system. Add new checks and balances so that someone with a better structural incentive to reject bad laws is in a position to veto them, like the US Senate used to be before the 17th amendment.
Or in the EU the structural problems will be different and you may need something different, but you still need something or the status quo tomorrow will be what it was yesterday.
If you read GDPR in it's complete form [1], there are 173 paragraphs before the actual law begins at CHAPTER I, almost half way down the page. Those are the reasons why the law was created, what's it trying to achieve, how it is intended to work, responsibilities of govenrnments, etc.
The EU provided us the spirit of the law - in writing.
If people care about privacy, then over time they will migrate to companies and services that respect their privacy. Government laws are broad based policies that always lack nuance. This is why it is better to let markets drive better outcomes organically.
Or, alternatively, you _could_ enforce the law but the resources to do so (people) are no longer available. This happens a lot in the US when the current admin doesn't feel it's important, so doesn't fund the enforcement agencies. And is particularly true more of codes/regulations (I get them confused) than of laws.
First order of blame goes to the national DPAs for not carrying out their duties.
Second order of blame goes go to whichever EU authority is responsible for penalizing EU member states for non-compliance. There should be serious consequences for non-enforcement like frozen funding. (I don't know what the actual legal process is)
> If people care about privacy, then over time they will migrate to companies and services that respect their privacy.
This is just a libertarian fairy-tale that is designed to sound sensible and rational while being malicious in practice. It exploits information asymmetry, human ignorance, network effects, and our general inability to accurately assess long-term consequences, in order to funnel profits into the hands of the most unscrupulous businesses.
In other words, there's a reason why we have to have regulations that protect people from themselves (and protect well-being of society as a whole).
Investigating murders is enforceable. If law enforcement isn't doing their job then that is a different problem. By virtue of being on the Internet, tracking cookies span many legal jurisdictions (even ones outside of the EU that never agreed to GDPR) and therefore run into all sorts of different legal obstacles. Apples and oranges and all that.
> This is just a libertarian fairy-tale that is designed to sound sensible and rational while being malicious in practice. It exploits information asymmetry, human ignorance, network effects, and our general inability to accurately assess long-term consequences, in order to funnel profits into the hands of the most unscrupulous businesses.
No, it allows people to be adults and vote with their feet. We do this all the time in many other areas and it works. (Exactly what the free market is based on) This is not to say that there shouldn't be any privacy and anti-spam laws, but when it comes to allowing marketing/advertising the trade-off has been well understood for some time. We are all funneling a lot of profits into companies that provide software to serve up the cookie banner warnings now and the advertisers still end up getting lots of people's data. A poorly designed law is a bad law. Legally requiring consent upfront and the ramifications of that decision should have been thought through much more thoroughly.
Yes, that is precisely the problem with GDPR, too. Enforcement is supposed to be carried out by national Data Protection Authorities but they just don't investigate. I've reported some clear cut violations and they never followed up on anything.
Swedish one is even being taken to court for completely neglecting their duties: https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-takes-swedish-dpa-court-refusing-pro...
> By virtue of being on the Internet, tracking cookies span many legal jurisdictions (even ones outside of the EU that never agreed to GDPR) and therefore run into all sorts of different legal obstacles.
It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant to the general enforcement issue. Most DPAs seem to be failing to enforce even the simplest of cases. Let's chat about the edge cases and jurisdiction when the clear cut cases are being taken care of reliably.
No, it's not the problem with GDPR. As explained earlier it has to do with jurisdictional overreach.
> It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant to the general enforcement issue. Most DPAs seem to be failing to enforce even the simplest of cases. Let's chat about the edge cases and jurisdiction when the clear cut cases are being taken care of reliably.
Edge cases and jurisdiction are at the heart of this issue and exactly why it is a bad law. This is exactly the baggage that bad laws create!
It isn't that this can't be enforced, it just lagged because of the size and changes that this law brought.
> Also, this is a problem that naturally solves itself over time, so no law was ever needed.
How does it solve itself?
> The UX of the web degraded for everyone after GDPR was passed and that I think everyone can agree on.
Due to website operators doing illegal things.
> If people care about privacy, then over time they will migrate to companies and services that respect their privacy.
Why would people care about something they don't know about?
How long have these laws been out and we are still dealing with these issues. They seem to have gotten worse, not better.
> How does it solve itself?
People build services that don't track others and people pay for those services. It's pretty simple.
> Due to website operators doing illegal things.
If it was so illegal it would be stopped, but apparently businesses are indeed complying with the law.
> Why would people care about something they don't know about?
It's well known that cookies track you across sites and some people choose not to use those sites. The sites are required to disclose this information, so users are definitely aware.
No, they have gotten better. Earlier reject all was barely seen on the internet. Now it is on the majority of places or at least in much more places. How is that getting worse? Can you please explain how it has gotten worse or why you think it has gotten worse?
> People build services that don't track others and people pay for those services. It's pretty simple.
How would an average individual know that a service is tracking them if the service doesn't need their consent for it?
> If it was so illegal it would be stopped, but apparently businesses are indeed complying with the law.
GDPR art. 7.3:
"The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time. 2The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. 3Prior to giving consent, the data subject shall be informed thereof. 4It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent."
So the law states that it must be as easy to reject cookies as to accept. That means that it is illegal to hide reject all.
In the parent post of this thread there is even a link about a court case:
https://www.techspot.com/news/108043-german-court-takes-stan...
So has your opinion with this information changed on who is to blame for the bad UX? If not, why not?
> It's well known that cookies track you across sites and some people choose not to use those sites. The sites are required to disclose this information, so users are definitely aware.
Maybe now, because of GDPR forcing site operators for asking consent to being tracked. But you said that it would happen organically without GDPR. I'm confused, even you, in the last sentence say that sites are required to disclose information but that is because of GDPR. It isn't the market somehow reaching that point organically. So which is it because you seem to agree that GDPR is needed but at the same time you are saying that it isn't needed and the market would sort it out. I'm really confused now.
On the other hand, there is the issue how the intent of laws (which were often passed by highly incompetent politicians, in particular when IT topics are involved) is to be interpreted.
and even if the law somehow becomes a perfect ideal filter for separating good from bad ... its enforcement will run into the problem of false positives and negatives as long as it deals with messy real world events and their various imperfect impressions found in whatever evidence is collected in a case.
well, of course a more competent electorate and politicians would be nice anyway, but now we run into the problem of competence in the eyes of who?
first case was around 2018-2019 and then it took some time for the cookie banner consent thing to percolate through the courts. (the Hungarian data protection agency already issued a ~3000 EUR fine in 2018-08 and cited the GDPR. and the Hungarian DPA cites this 2019 EU court case which is explicitly about cookie consent [1])
and according to this tracker - https://noyb.eu/en - there are 2B fines already imposed and (883 total cases and still 468 pending)
[1] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...
What are you referring to here? Where in the law is this allowed?
- The law allows things it shouldn't, or
- The law disallows things it should
And the later gets swept under the rug as "we won't enforce it that way"... and then it winds up getting enforced exactly that way because someone has an agenda, and this is a hammer.
There is no malicious compliance here, just breaking the law. So if it is the problem of laws that they are broken then according to you all laws are 100% the problem. That stance, IMO, is beyond stupid.
It's the same issue as with most EU-wide issues, where there's always countries competing with each other at the benefit of others.
Also GDPR is not exclusive to browsers or internet, it's applicable universally, for both online and offline businesses and processes, which is why it can't and doesn't prescribe exact technical implementation details.
As that will erode most worth derived from tracking, sensible operators will decide to stop annoying users and just ditch the tracking altogether. Or so I hope. I wouldn't know, as Brave does a pretty good job of hiding cookie banners in the mean-time.
Unfortunately, I don't actually think people realize the law is on their side here. My girlfriend never clicked "Reject All" until I told her to because she thought something wouldn't work if she did that!
Otherwise, the purpose of the law is what it does -- mandate annoying tracking popups on every website.
*sigh*
Once again; the goal of the GDPR is to give users control of their personal data. There are (believe it or not) legitimate reasons why somebody might want to be tracked or allow their personal data to be collected; this is perfectly fine, provided its done fairly and the user gives their explicit opt-in consent.
This shouldn't be hard to understand.
Frankly, users don't want control at all costs, where that cost is "make the entire web really annoying." Either ban tracking or don't, but the current cost is too high.
There is noting wrong with tracking (indeed, it is essential for some services), provided it is done fairly with a clear opt-in.
> but the current cost is too high.
If you think the cost of providing informed consent (!) is "too high", them I'm afraid we live on different planets.
If you don't like being constantly nagged to provide informed consent, then direct your ire to the scummy add-tech industry who are parasites on the web. One can serve up advertising without needing to invade a users privacy.
> There is noting wrong with tracking
But then you turn around and describe tracking as "scummy," "parasites," and "invading privacy."
Again, I would find it less objectionable to just make tracking illegal than this "informed consent" bullshit (which is mostly not actually informed consent because no one wants to spend the time to be informed about every fricking decision here, it's just a website).
I assume reading comprehension isn't your strong point!
I described the ad-tech industry in those terms. Not genuine services who need to use my personal data and to whom I grant informed opt-in permission!
I'm genuinely puzzled why this (and the GDPR principles in general) appears to be an alien concept to many who should know better.
Otherwise how can we explain “please see our privacy policy and send us a sneaker email to opt out” kind of tracking options.
Imagine you write a program to do something and it doesn't work at all as expected and at the same time it causes endless annoyance to users.
A law is very similar to a program. It's software for the society. It didn't work and the authors are blaming everybody except themselves.
We’re also seeing tracking despite the lack of user consent as well. This could be a fluke but when I make anonymous search on website and switch to another, I’m seeing the product I have just searched in the ads. With all the tracking disabled I mind you.
I don't know if they'll finally find a way to control the spying, but how many years have passed since they made the law?
We put a lot of safeguards, exception handling and all kind of measures to control errors.
What is the unintended consequence of GDPR?
It's impossible to write things correctly the first or final time and especially with the interpretation of words changing over time it doesn't matter if you could.
Example: In cycling, they banned narrow handlebars. There's an aero advantage, but it was seen as a safety problem. So cyclists canted their brake hoods way inside, rested their hands on the brake hoods, and got an aero advantage.
And now there's a rule about brake hoods. Laws are meant only be living things that change as society changes, and also change to patch what we might call "exploits." You are perfectly correct: It's never one and done, it's an ongoing process.
That way, a misplaced comma or a wonky sentence doesn't allow for easy loopholes that need tighter laws to fix issues.
Now law text will work forever, but this format makes for a very solid foundation.
To quote Article 4(11) – Definition of Consent
> ‘Consent’ of the data subject means any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her.
Meaning if you force users into pressing a button or let them scroll through 1000 no options, with one easy yes option, you have not collected their free consent. Congrats you broke the law.
Meaning if you just have them click yes, but not informed them about the harmful data collection you did not collect free consent.
The law is pretty clear on that.
--------
[1] Here “legitimate interest” essentially means “we see your preference not to be stalked, but we want to so we are going to make it that bit more faf to opt out, because fuck you and the privacy we lie about caring about”.
Definitely the spirit of it, though some claim not the letter or it due to loopholes.
> The decline button means decline all.
It certainly should, but I never trust it does (with other dark patterns on show I'm all out of benefit-of-the-doubt) and go into to "details" to look for objection toggles. Not that I particularly trust those anyway, but that is a different niggle!
I agree, it should do. But many sites don't consider the “legitimate interest” crap (“we see your preference not to be stalked, but we want to anyway so you'll have to object separately”) to not be something that they have to get consent for, hence the option is to object/not rather than to consent/not. If you hit decline all without objecting to “legitimate interests” [sic], in at least some case, I suspect many, much tracking will still happen.
> The Google dialog kind of describes it perfectly: "Decline all cookies for this additional purposes".
IIRC Google's preferences don't include any legitimate interest gubbins at all, so that isn't really relevant. And just because one tracking nag screen does things a certain way, does not mean that many others work differently.
The extension I use is called Ghostery and it also claims to block other tracking.
Programming your computer to automatically click "yes" sounds like affirmatively giving consent to all popups to me. The standard for consent here is lower than for things like sex.
Which descriptor do you think is unambiguously violated by making it easier to provide consent than withhold it? To my eyes, both 'freely' and 'informed' are plausibly upheld.
It would be very straightforward to specify that consent and withholding must be equally accessible in the interface, instead of splitting hairs about definitions of "freely given". This is what people refer to when they say the law is poorly written
> Art 7(3) It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent. [0]
But legal interpretation of GP I believe is reaching the consensus that that phrasing too is broken by that implementation:
> Free and informed consent (Art. 7 GDPR): Consent is valid only if it is freely given. When the option to decline is hidden or unnecessarily cumbersome, the user's choice is affected and consent is no longer "free." [1]
[0] https://gdpr.eu/article-7-how-to-get-consent-to-collect-pers...
[1] https://www.ictrechtswijzer.be/en/complaint-about-cookies-wi...
Now I'm left wondering why enforcement was supposedly so hard. Seems like shooting fish in a barrel, especially given that some very large websites were in clear violation of this article
But we see how some companies cough cough Apple cough throw massive hissy fits and tries to find the most minuscule opening on the law
If it wasn't, the ghoulish masquerade of Corporate Social Responsibility wouldn't be a thing - it in itself a response to Milton Friedman's 1970 article “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” which argued that corporate executives are agents of shareholders and should focus solely on maximizing returns, not social responsibility.
People always say this, but as far as I can tell it's not true.
Ford lost this case because he overtly admitted that he wasn't pursuing profit and because he was deliberately trying to prevent minority shareholders from getting money to start up a rival car company.
If he had just made some vague claim that what he was doing was in the long-term interest of shareholders, he probably would have gotten away with it.
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. - https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354
> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits.
——
The best I understand it, what this ultimately means is that, yes; if the shareholders hold a vote to say "you need to focus on profits over X thing you're doing now/planning to do", you have to do that, but absent a specific shareholder mandate, you are not in any way obligated to seek profit over all else.
How else should we view them? Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, probably a duck.
Nobody justified the behavior, only stated that corporations have proven over time to generally seek profits over all else. They provide legal cover to bad-faith actions. That wasn't the original intention, but it is absolutely the current state of the world.
A "loophole" is only a "loophole" to someone who agrees with yours. And I say it as someone who agrees in this particular instance.
Whereas you get publicly-traded companies and the primary shareholders are investment funds, whose managers get bonuses based on short-term results and who may not be in the same job or having the fund hold the same companies in as little as a year from now. So their incentive is to have companies squeeze customers for short-term gains and then choose the right time to pawn the shares off on some bag holders who see strong recent numbers and don't realize what that strategy does to the company's long-term prospects.
Literally what a corporation is.
This is capitalism mate. People will do basically anything with the "for the company" excuse. If they don't, they will be out of a job and eventually starve.
Laws are the only things that can limit corporations. Without those we'd still have children working, 14 hour shifts and no weekends.
Sure, some of you are just so good and nice that you're going to spend all of your time trying to better your fellow man no matter the incentives. The rest of us are spending our time and energy trying to better ourselves. It's better for everyone if the rules of the game are set up so those actions create positive externalities.
They obviously looked at the alternatives and decided that the benefits of cookies or the cost of compliance is bad enough to allow for this crappy experience. And they all pretty much decided across the board.
So what problem is this cookie crap trying to solve? No one asked for it, no one wants to comply and now we're just making the web worse off as a result.
This is a critical failure point which should get more attention. Laws (and regulations) are like computer code in some key ways. Early computer code was written assuming it would be run by experts in trusted, benign environments that were relatively fixed in size and complexity. Our legislative law-making structures were created with similar assumptions. As the world changed, code changed but law-making structures didn't.
At a minimum, while being drafted laws should be subject to independent red-teaming and penetration testing to A) Assess their ability to actually accomplish their stated intent over time in the real world, and B) Surface likely unintended perverse consequences. Of course, that still wouldn't solve the issue of intentional weakening of laws with vague terminology, incomplete scoping, inserting loopholes, exceptions, etc by special-interest-driven legislators.
Sadly, these days I think intentional nerfing of laws during drafting is the biggest cause of 'bad laws'. But at least the red-teaming concept might prevent some unintended bugs on top of lobbyist-driven nerfing.
The intent was nice, but the ask from the article is essentially asking browsers to implement uBlock Origin built-in and expect Google to just comply without pushback.
Unlike to happen because the ones that got us the current law, the ones that make the browsers, and the ones that make money from the ads (cookies == ads) are all the same companies.
Did you read the law text? It specifically says that there always has to be a Decline All option available and even defines that they have to be as quickly accessible (click and navigation wise) as the tracking option.
It also defines that tracking is NOT an opt out, but an opt in, which literally every US website on the internet interpreted wrongly on purpose with their malicious compliance strategy.
Of course. The law is clear, the intent is clear and the guidelines are clear.
I think the biggest challenge (and the reason why it feels this is everywhere) is because of the handful of "big corporations" controlling the browsers. Neither Apple nor Google have any interest in making tracking opt-in or working to make this into a standard.
In my view, the situation will be greatly improved with policy like the DMA being amplified even further to prevent cartel-like reactions from the FAANGs (whatever the acronym is today). We have a deep "culture difference" with the US, where everyone expects everything to be spelled out for them in the law so they can sue each other into oblivion, but the reality is this doesn't work. We need to reduce the influence of bigger players and install guardrails so it will never be possible again for a single company to have such dramatic influence over the world.
Imagine how many of these consent prompts can be removed if it wasn't for the fact that even loading a Google Font exposes one to a few hundred "partners"?
Strictly speaking, that's how civil law works, spelling out explicitly the statutes.
By contrast, common law statutes can be (but are not always), more concise but more vague, putting greater emphasis on the courts to interpret them.
That is one reason USA is more litigious, but it probably isn't the only reason. After all, Germany has the infamous legal bounty hunters (one of the words may be "Abmahnanwälte" but I think there's a different one), and Germany is a civil law country, so USA being common law can't fully explain it.
Take Apple for example, it takes years just to complete a single “unlawful termination” suit, and it would be … decades before the world can equalise the damage from their App Store practices. And all while this is going on, corps are pouring huge amount of money into lobbying so by the end they nerf or even reverse the very policy that keeps them accountable.
Apple has taken steps to make it harder to track, both in iOS apps and in the browser.
It's Google whose revenue depends entirely on surveillance advertising.
The problem is that the technical methods surveillance ad networks use within the browser to track us are features that are useful for many other things.
Trying to redefine this as a technical problem, that can be solved purely by getting the browser makers to change how browsers work, rather than a sociopolitical problem, will fail. Sure, there are more things that Google—and probably Apple—could be doing to protect us, but they can't completely stop the tracking.
The way to stop the tracking is to make laws banning targeted advertising.
Apple engages in “privacy washing” - they take steps in the name of privacy when it disadvantages their competitors. At the same time, Apple has no problem collecting say Spotlight and Safari search terms … or “features” from Photos etc.
I agree that ads as a monetisation channel were a mistake. But beyond that, privacy is a human right and should be applied without exception.
If there is, I'll be the first to say they shouldn't be doing that, and I would definitely prefer them not to be collecting it in the first place, but there are different kinds and purposes of data collection.
People respond to this with "but you don't have to track people to show them ads!" But that's naive and shows that you really haven't thought it through. What's the value of an ad to you in Chinese? Russian? Japanese? Latvian?
The answer is zero. You would constantly get ads that are completely irrelevant to you and the company that bought advertising. Even with today's tracking this still happens a lot. I still ads every week that are in a language I do not understand.
Take your Google Fonts example - would that even exist if it wasn't for the "exposed to 100 partners" part? Quite possibly not.
It's like saying having a secure OS/browser would deprive malware authors of revenue, and thus vulnerabilities should be preserved unless the user explicitly opts into patching them.
This combined with governments ignoring it, and actively enforcing GPC... it's questionable whether compliance is necessary (I still suggest treating it the same as a GPC signal).
But future work and effort should be put towards the GPC signal.
An approach like this seems ideal to me, the problem is that it's only natively supported in Firefox. Our instructions for Chrome and Edge are basically "install Privacy Badger."
And Safari is the WORST, which as an Apple customer it pains me to say. Not only does the browser not support it, there are ZERO Safari browser extensions, NONE, on ANY platform (mac/iphone/ipad), that you can install that will send a simple GPC signal with the HTTP headers. There is a paid Safari extension on iOS called ChangeTheHeaders that you can configure to send a GPC signal, but come on, you can't ask normal people to buy an app and manually enter a specific HTTP header. (ChangeTheHeaders is made by Jeff Johnson, the same dev as StopTheMadness. I asked him whether he'd consider adding user-friendly GPC signals to that (or any other) plugin and he said it would just be "duplicating functionality" :-/ )
California's "Opt Me Out Act" (AB 566) requires that by January 1, 2027, internet browsers must provide a built-in, easy-to-use setting that allows users to send an opt-out preference signal, such as Global Privacy Control.
The level of tracking is insane and would never happen in real life, and companies would be fined to oblivion had they tried, if not forced to close by an angry mob of people.
We really need to crack down on stalking-but-automated.
Which is why this is also illegal in the same jurisdiction.
If I buy baby food at Price Chopper, they might send me an email offering me discounts on diapers, but at least I (probably!) won't also get shown such ads literally everywhere I go on the web.
So many things are like that now. Like Roku sticks and TVs are subsidized by selling user data. You want to make a Roku competitor that doesn’t spy? Your product will struggle to get on shelves and to stay there, in part because the price for your product will be higher even if you get just as good a price on your components as they do, because you’d have to price them at-cost to match Roku’s pricing. Meanwhile 99% of people looking at the products don’t realize that one’s cheaper than the other because it’s going to spy on them and sell the data.
And this, plus the fact that it's so abstract and opaque what the negative consequences of that spying are, is a huge part of the problem with all of it.
We need better regulations on this, but sadly, even before the recent fascist takeover, the regulators have been largely asleep at the wheel for decades.
Browser-level permissions are about what the browser is sharing with the website, which is a different thing. For one, the browser sharing information with the website isn’t a blanket permission legally for the website to do anything with that information it likes.
Don’t track me means don’t track me, period.
Asking if you could track me etc. regardless is against the spirit of it and simply user hostile.
Users often want some level of tracking, like not having to log in to services they use across sites each time.
Digital stalking under the disguise of essential functions or calling it just tracking doesn’t do any good.
Some websites even purposely break their functionality when 3rd party cookies are disabled.
So, no, do-not-track is an order, do not stalk me, period.
That's functional, and doesn't need additional consent. The consent for that is given by pressing the login button.
You can login and buy things. But how do you choose whether the shop can kleep track of what you have bought to suggest rebuying or for you to keep a shoopping list. Requestion those is more than login.
> track of what you have bought to suggest rebuying
You know what you sold, no need to track user behaviour.
But hey, when the regulators are lawyers who have no idea what cookies and browser are, we get consent forms on every domain visit.
> when the regulators are lawyers who have no idea what cookies and browser are, we get consent forms on every domain visit.
In this case the regulators have considered the problem and implemented the law independent of the used technology. The software developers/companies were the clueless/malicious ones here.
That websites track you and then sell that data has nothing to do with how long your browser stores cookies. Cookies are just one of many, many ways that websites do tracking.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
Yes US sites will be doing that
It isn't even compliance, they are just breaking the rules by as much as they think they can get away with and so far, for the most part, they are getting away with it.
None of any technical ANYTHING matters until we (meaning law and government) inflict truly meaningful consequences. Fines, breaking up companies, perhaps even jail time, etc.
We just refuse to use them, because our politicians either believe that companies should have more rights than we do, or are terrified that if they actually try to enforce the law on them they'll lose out on massive amounts of campaign contributions (whether direct or indirect).
And before someone says that it will hamper innovation, I used to live in China and talk to investors often, they would always stress that for every guy with a billion who can't play by the rules there's a thousand guys with a million who have no problem taking the market share, that's hardly an issue
If I had more time I probably could have figured it out. But unfortunately I’m just running a hobby project and do not have weeks to spend on this. The revenue from the ads is what pays for hosting. I imagine lots of websites are in a similar boat.
I would love if there was a simpler option that could respect people’s privacy more, be less annoying, and that would still allow websites like mine to survive by running ads. Targeting browsers instead of websites could have been that option.
Would love something better than GPC, but in the interim, the EU should start considering it as a proper signal of (lack of) consent, obviating the need for a banner altogether.
Not bad.
(which is also why framing GDPR discussions around cookies misses the point - the point is to determine the user's consent to being tracked regardless of technical ability, whether cookies, IP address, fingerprinting, or even some magic crystal ball)
That is also illegal under the GDPR; you cannot track me without my explicit opt-in consent, whither by 'cookies' or other means.
I continue to be astounded how little grasp some HN readers (a technical news site!) have of the GDPR.
You HOPED that websites' top priority is to provide the best possible experience. The REALITY is that not getting sued is way more important than removing all possible user inconveniences.
Best way to get rid of the cookie banner is to just forbid tracking completely. Given a free choice, how many people actually want to be tracked?
Good question. But there isn't enough information to answer the question. Are these people properly informed about what "tracking" means, or do they think this means companies are passing around their full names and addresses on post-it notes?
There’s probably also a version for the adtech browser somewhere.
Edit: their FF-page says,
Set your preferences once, and let the technology do the rest!
This add-on is built and maintained by workers at Aarhus University in Denmark. We are privacy researchers that got tired of seeing how companies violate the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Because the organisations that enforce the GDPR do not have enough resources, we built this add-on to help them out.
We looked at 680 pop-ups and combined their data processing purposes into 5 categories that you can toggle on or off. Sometimes our categories don't perfectly match those on the website, so then we will choose the more privacy preserving option.
no, that's "I don't care about Cookies"
NoScript too.
And AdGuard.
I do this more and more, and I think it's the right and best thing to do.
If they are showing you a toggle and calling it for "legitimate interest", they are most likely lying.
They love to put cookies under "performance and enhancements" as if that isn't bullshit as well.
All legitimate interest cookies are in the greyed out toggle for "required cookies".
By law, you can decline all and the site should still work fine, which again means they won't allow you to turn off actually needed cookies.
Just because the law says you should have a reject all doesn’t mean sites do it.
If that was the case, then why does the site from the EU first off track... and secondly why does it use a cookie banner rather than some other solution that would not be malicious compliance with the law?
If there was a solution to having cookies and some other way of informing visitors of it, shouldn't that be demonstrated on the official EU government explaining GDPR?
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...
Can a company go wrong implementing the same approach as https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en uses? Why is that considered malicious compliance with the law?
If you are asking why there isn't a "reject all" button on their webpage then the answer is simple. There is one. The "Accept only essential cookies".
> and secondly why does it use a cookie banner rather than some other solution that would not be malicious compliance with the law?
GDPR (general data protection regulation) is about general data protection, not about technology. It applies the same no matter if you are using cookies or something else.
> Can a company go wrong implementing the same approach as https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en uses? Why is that considered malicious compliance with the law?
The example you've given is an example of compliance since there is a button to reject all tracking cookies. Whenever you read the words malicious compliance within the context of this discussion you can just swap it with the word illegal which is the correct word for the behavior that is being bemoaned here.
I don't think that's the case. A number of people downthread are quite explicit that they find being asked at all annoying and don't think websites should be allowed to throw up cookie banners all the time.
If a company is deciding how to comply with the GDPR on its website, can it go wrong with copying how that site does it? Alternatively, if it tries something that is new, do they risk getting sued by the EU for not following the GDPR?
My claim that it isn't malicious compliance to use cookie consent banners, but rather the least risky approach since that is exactly how europa.eu complies with their own laws.
Cookie banners are perfectly valid solution to the problem. GP originally said that the ideal solution is to avoid cookie banners by not tracking users. Not that if you want to track users there is a better solution than presenting them with a cookie banner.
> If a company is deciding how to comply with the GDPR on its website, can it go wrong with copying how that site does it?
No, because that is how it is spelled out in the law. Rejecting tracking must be as simple as accepting it. On the EU website both those options are presented in a clear way.
> My claim that it isn't malicious compliance to use cookie consent banners, but rather the least risky approach since that is exactly how europa.eu complies with their own laws.
There is no malicious compliance. If it is done as it is done on the EU site then it is compliant. If it isn't then it is illegal. Malicious compliance means that the letter of the law is strictly followed so to cause/do something not intended by the law. In case of hiding the reject button, that is illegal.
Nobody wants this crap.
The problem is that there's a chronic lack of enforcement, so the winning strategy is to breach the regulation. Worst case scenario, you will merely be forced to clean house at some point (but can enjoy the rewards of tracking until then).
I'm so cynical now that I can't read articles like this without my first reaction being to look at how it benefits companies that profit from ads.
My two theories here?
1. An attempt to shift liability from companies having to comply with GDPR to browsers having to comply.
2. An attempt to consolidate all cookie consent into the three (?) browser engines we have... so efforts to thwart it can be focused on just those places.
Should have been written in the law that it’s a one toggle in browser settings.
If government is going to impose on the internet the least they could do is be competent in what they impose. Not writing laws that waste lifetimes in collective hours a day as every person in Europe deals with multiple of these dialogs a day and thousands a year.
It did not. These practices are illegal under the GDPR, the problem is a chronic lack of enforcement by most national enforcement agencies in all but the most severe cases.
Some are just ineffective but others have gone completely rogue. Swedish Data Protection Authority (DPA) for example takes the position that commercial data brokers like Mrkoll are allowed to publish and sell people's personal information (including your current home address, hello stalkers!) [1] and that this is somehow protected under the pretense of "journalism" [2].
[1] https://mrkoll.se/resultat?n=Otto&c=&min=16&max=120&sex=a&c_...
[2] https://noyb.eu/en/swedish-data-brokers-claim-journalists-le...
> IMY’s practice of simply “forwarding” complaints.
> The IMY’s way of dealing with complaints since the Supreme Administrative Court ruling is to attach an “appeal form” to their (non-)decisions. But it still doesn’t investigate the complaints. Instead, the authority simply forwards the complaint to the entity that illegally processes personal data and then immediately closes the case. This also happened in the case preceding noyb’s current legal action against the IMY. After a data subject filed a complaint regarding a recorded phone call, the authority forwarded it to the respondent without investigating.
[3] https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-takes-swedish-dpa-court-refusing-pro...
No!
For crying out loud..... The law says if you want to track me (advertisers take a bow) then in each case, you must have my explicit opt-in permission to do so. And so you should!
Having a browser toggle setting isn't explicit opt-in consent.
And way before that (before spyware became common on the web) there was P3P: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P
Now there is Global Privacy Control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Privacy_Control
The problem isn't technical - the problem is that ultimately spyware operators want to track people so it isn't in their interest to support these solutions and won't do so unless they are forced to. Since enforcement is significantly lacking, operators adopt the pragmatic strategy of non-compliance or pseudo-compliance with the current banners.
That law has "discovered" that these rules for these sites suck because nobody wants to sit and decide what they want on a site by site basis and thus the "just get out of my face" kinda clicking and annoyance works.
The idea that just visiting any given site I visit means I have to make some legal agreement makes no sense.
And it's all because the law was written by lawyers who care less about user experience or privacy than the companies that have to enforce it.
I mean... uh.
If the world would only consist of people who want to cooperate and don't have malicious intentions, then WE WOULDN'T NEED THE LAW AT ALL.
The law exists BECASUE OF the people who don't want to comply. So if the law doesn't control those people who don't want to comply, then the problem is with the law.
Because if we're saying that the problem is with the people, then the discussion is pointless like a black hole.
Do any browsers support running a minified LLM on device through an extension?
Training an LLM to reject optional cookies (or better yet, fuck with the telemetry) would seem highly doable nowadays.
I started to write this comment meaning to add that Firefox does it all by itself now, but I just read that such feature "is not currently available anymore".
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cookie-banner-reduction
Does anyone know what happened after years of development, before I delve into their Bugzilla to find out?
So some websites actually require an accept/reject, and don't work if just visually hiding the banner, which is what this does.
It could easily say “browsers have to” and 8 billion people would be spared the perpetual annoyance of cookie poop up warnings.
First, I, the user, am requesting to open the website. It's not the website imposing on me. My browser, which supposedly is under my control, is what forwards all the data.
Second, there is absolutely no way to know whether the website actually does what it says based on the cookie pop up. If it's a website based outside the EU then there's no way to enforce this cookie pop up.
But if the browser handles this, then there is a way to enforce it. Of course, the downside there is that the website will then use other means to potentially collect the data, meaning that you still need the law to limit such data collection.
"Spend Five Minutes in a Menu of Legalese" is not the intended alternative to "Accept All". "Decline All" is! And this is starting to be enforced through the courts, so you're increasingly seeing the "Decline All" option right away. As it should be. https://www.techspot.com/news/108043-german-court-takes-stan...
Of course, also respecting a Do-Not-Track header and avoiding the cookie banner entirely while not tracking the user, would be even better.