throwaway_sb666

Germany is in a very tough spot energy-wise and is the most impacted by the Russian sanctions. A lot of house heating is gas and that isn't something you can change in 6 month. So in the very short term they probably need coal to replace the gas where possible so that stockpiles can meet next winters demand for heating.

But for medium-term, a lot of infrastructure investment will be needed. Times are such that the public will be quick to condemn investment in fossil energy, so there will be pressure to find green solutions where feasible.

The other day I saw a headline that France had stopped subsidizing gas heating installations. I don't get why it took a Russian war to do that, but apparently it did.

There have been many other such headlines. Will it matter? Probably some, maybe a lot... one can hope.

Edit: or maybe the opposite. who knows

> my main concern was actually running strange 3rd party fingerprinting / zombie-tracker / god-knows-what

Exactly - i briefly looked into https://www.ethicalads.io/ but mostly IT related ads it seems.

> Facebook's ads (at least on Instagram) show me really cool things, while Google (who should know way more about me) shows me complete garbage

I personally remember being pretty shocked at how the Facebook like button & social login spread to everywhere and they could track you all around. Long time ago. Facebook probably knows a lot more about you than you think.

Ok fair enough.

What I meant to say was that pressure to enforce laws only happen if there is public pressure to see the law implemented, and when the concepts are too abstract/intangible, the public disengages more easily from the issue.

Political will for improvements and funding is more likely to happen with more public support as counter to the influence of industry lobbists.

Public support is easier to rally when people can personally relate, or ideally share a pain point. A good candidate would be the annoying pop-up boxes. Frame them as dangerous because increasing the risk of online data and identity leaks. Solution to this threat to public security is to eliminate them by default answer. Simple law proposal.

Terve! Not surprised to see Finland slightly ahead of the curve.

I think the default is that most people, professionals included, don't understand the law and throw in the banner-spam to be on the safe side or because of outdated checklists.

I have zero problem with (edit: first-party) cookies, only with the web being a horrible UX for 95% of people, so hope more official websites can lead the way, so that pop-ups can slowly be de-normalized in peoples minds.

Edit:

> https://finlex.fi/en/

Nice find. Also:

https://oikeusministerio.fi/en/frontpage

Can they inform Denmark?

https://www.justitsministeriet.dk/

Honestly I think the GDPR/cookie consent providers should be held equally liable as the website owner for the collective violations facilitated by their product.

I think being able to go after the enablers and profiteers would make enforcement much easier.

An officially maintained list of legal/illegal libraries and services could help website owners to chose a known legal solution. Right now it's hard to expect website owners 'do the right thing' when there's so much contradictory information out there.

A better analogy was if you were forced to use the toilet every time you entered a store you haven't been to previously... Just why in the world would I need to take part in such a wasteful charade.

More charitably and historically accurate, it's the result of hardcore political negotiations with the originally proposed legislation watered down due to pressure from politicians and governments influenced by lobbyists.

But yeah, the result is too complicated to be effectively enforced, sadly. So further reform is needed.

Hot take: Only way to undo past damage is to now make the cookie/consent banner illegal.

https://gdpr.eu/cookies/ lol ;-)

https://european-union.europa.eu/

https://www.sundhed.dk/

https://www.securite-sociale.fr/

4 out of 4 in my case. May I ask which ones you checked, I'm genuinely curious, cause I really don't remember seeing any official website in the EU without cookie banner in many years.

> The most common use of “tracking” cookies is just to be able to count unique views for your site, which I think is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do.

Sure, and I don't remember if this is currently legal without need to notify/ask, but I think it should be.

As long as the tracking data is legally and technically isolated to only domains/apps/devices controlled by the same entity... Most people have the expectation that a website/business will be able to remember them across visits from the same browser.

But people will not necessarily have this expectation of being recognized across domains or different devices - indeed most people won't know it's even possible - so anything facilitating such identify/profile correlation should be considered illegal tracking by default. The specific technical method of creating the correlation should not matter. Honestly this could extend to non-web profile building as well.

The exception, of course, is if the user has self-identified by logging in.

> Other examples of where cross-site tracking is useful is for preventing online payments fraud. You have a similar IRL version of this where your bank will freeze your card if it sees purchases being made in different countries simultaneously.

True, completely agree. There are already blanket exemptions for certain uses in the GDPR and those should be extended as needed for use cases that have legitimate value. Cookie law should be changed so no need to ask/inform the user about these use cases other than in the website's privacy statement, where such tracking should be stated.

Industries handling such tracking data should be regulated and audited to ensure proper handling and use of the data. Again I think this should be applied as a broader principle, and I think for example loyalty programs should be also audited to ensure compliance with legal uses of the collected data.

> Enforcement was partially privatized, and the free market, as it often does, found a better and more efficient way of enforcing the law than the government could dream of.

I'm not a fan of this. You're replacing one kind of dark-pattern wielding, stain-on-underpants-of-society, predator with another!

You will spawn industries of failed lawyers going after the easy money, i.e. clueless everyday people who inadvertently misconfigured wordpress and can't afford a lawyer when they get threatened with court cases if they don't pay the extortion fees.

Just like asshole copyright lawyers under Germany's shitty jurisdiction extending their disgusting and threatening attacks on everyday citizens around Europe who dare to have a personal webpage without being experts in copyright law. As with ad-tech, also not the kind of enterprises we need to have in our society. Also wouldn't shed a tear for that industry to just die.

If you do this kind of thing you need to directly target the companies enabling the illegal behavior, not the website owners.

> I was just asserting out that a law that banned spyware-based advertising would harm the current website ecomomy which is largely based around spyware.

I think that largely, the website economy is based around advertising. I honestly doubt the advertising-centered business model would disappear even if large-scale tracking did. Would it be less targeted and less efficient on a micro-level - yes probably.

But less abusive advertising would also have upsides for website owners: Privacy conscious people are increasingly blocking all ads, losing them eyeballs. Privacy friendly ads may be given a pass.

Right now it's mostly impossible for privacy-conscious people to support a website the like by looking at their ads. The adtech industry is to blame for this for data-raping people. Website owners would benefit from a sustainable advertising model, where users don't have to make the choice between not contributing financially, vs sacrificing their privacy to data leeches. All the websites crying over ad-blockers would instead be forced to use legal ad networks that don't rely on illegal tracking, and people might again be willing to look at ads for content.

Brave is an interesting take, but I think the more optimal solution is to just ban the practice of tracking and shadow-profile building. Problem solved, and I don't need to encourage people to install ad-blockers anymore.

> The problem is continuous lack of enforcement

Yeah, but it's hard to enforce a law at scale when the difference between legal and illegal behavior is not obvious to a layperson. The law is too technical.

It also has shouldn't have options where a user can simply allow further data collection, since this makes it hard clearly say whether a certain practice is legal or not, since it "will depend".

This creates more friction to enforcement. If things were more clear-cut, enforcement could be automated, and you would probably see those fines roll out.

It is harder to say "this software library is illegal to use in the EU" if there are certain circumstances where it's not.

I agree that a cookie banner is pointless. But they are even on government websites, so obviously something has gone terribly wrong along they way (hint: lobbyism).

My thinking goes like this:

1. The law explicitly talks of requesting consent.

2. Incentives will drive actors to request additional permissions if possible (you always get some legal, can claim ignorance, etc)

3. People get constant intrusions wasting our collective time and attention on an enormous scale.

The current law is encouraging this type of user-hostile behavior. This is stating an objective fact, since the current situation is clearly a result of the current law.

If any type of consent-banner or opt-in method is allowed, industry groups will lobby for loopholes they can use to trick users using whatever mechanism the law leaves at their disposal.

Just outright ban the use of cross-site tracking and user profiling. We don't have a societal need for this to be legal.

Check my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30755527

Yeah like instead of having them on the street, they could have a shop and you could tax them a lot and make sure people know what they are getting into.

Same with sharing personal data - maybe not a bad parallel :)

Appreciate the sentiment. Policy changes will probably always hurt somebody. The expectation is the the economy will realign around new goals.

In this case it's even simpler since a software company would like be able to develop a new product with hopefully more value to society than the vast majority of data collecting companies provide. I'm also not too afraid for tech workers being able to find other jobs, although I'm sorry for any other collateral damage.

If the law is right, but not possible to enforce, some fixing may be needed

Disagree. Let it burn, it's the only way. (change my mind?)

This made me think of the Ukraine war, and how the sanctions may turn out to be a bigger help to climate crisis than any political entity could muster on the basis of the impeding climate snafu. Sometimes radical action is the right course of action; for democracy-(pre)serving reasons our governance systems often inhibit change unless most of the population is rallied around a specific cause as we see with Ukraine. That is the time for radical change to happen, or democracies would never progress. End of sidetrack :)

EDIT: I mean, Strong agree with "Necessary site functionality, without the spyware. ", but disagree with last part

Those that don't require opt-out according to the law. Too lazy to look up the legal definition right now.

Edit: by law I mean the GDPR.

Edit2: Get rid of the "cookie banner law" entirely, actually make it illegal, but require easily found links to privacy statement

> Did we consider that if everyone is breaking the law, the law itself might need a rework?

Agreed - IMO, make cookie banners illegal and make 'minimum cookies' the default. Done?

His channel is clearly anti-CCP. He's married to a Chinese woman, and I believe genuinely loves China.

Having lived in Beijing and Shenzhen for almost 7 years, I find that where I have first hand experience his reporting is pretty accurate.

Would you mind to elaborate why you consider it bottom of the gutter grifting? Genuinely curious to hear another perspective.