But of course it’s impossible to convince someone of something when their livelihood depends on their not understanding it.
any sort of elevation prompt, IF I allow them to be popups or an icon in a toolbar, should always be in the same place and not cover the page.
There’s no way this would fly. “I didn’t read it” can’t possibly be an excuse to avoid being bound by an agreement. Every party to an agreement that flaunted its terms, even though they took advantage of the benefits granted by it, would invoke it as a defense, and it’s irrefutable. The system would completely fall apart if this happened.
There’s a balance that needs to be carefully managed here. Yes, fairness to consumers is important. But you can’t destroy the incentive to produce value in so doing.
Only engineers have trouble understanding this. It can be a reasonable defense, and it has successfully been used in courts of law many times. The law is not a machine that compiles text like code literally. Imagine someone who coerces a dying or sick person to sign an agreement they couldn’t possibly be in a reasonable state of mind to understand what they were doing -- the law can and does invalidate such “contracts”. That is the same principle behind age of consent laws. The law could theorerically (and does) invalidate “agreements” which no one is reasonably expected to read and understand.
> The law could theorerically (and does) invalidate “agreements” which no one is reasonably expected to read and understand.
I haven’t heard of a single case where an agreement was voided because “no one could reasonably be expected to understand it.” Unless the language was so impenetrable or vague that the agreement itself could not be discerned. Lawyers tend not to write such agreements.
Also, striking an unconscionable term typically does not void the whole contract. Just the term in question.
The value is derived from the people consuming the product. Placing the "incentive to produce value" above the people who presumably are the source of this value seems...misaligned.
What we need is an environment that does not give the producers asymmetric power over consumers and the products will naturally align with that.
So lawmakers do know how to make legally binding preferences based on device settings? What a crazy innovation.. now if only parents were given these options to indicate their child is using a device.. we could do away with all this Online Safety Act nonsense...
Browsers already had settings for deleting cookies. There was never a reason for banners whose only function was pulling the ladder up from smaller competitors and concentrating power in the hands of an oligopoly that could siphon data directly from the OS.
This coupled with a law mandating ISPs provide a "change IP on demand" feature would have given users a sort of "Tor light" level of privacy. Strong privacy is trivial to achieve for a government that doesn't have a conflicting goal of total surveillance.
The online safety acts and its EU counterparts are somewhat risky, but nobody wants the mention the only proper alternative: a total ban on "social media." Not just for kids, but for everyone. Or a ban on smart phones, that would work too, at least short term. But: money.
This is unfortunately the reality.
The other day a friend asked me to help her make her phone safer for her kids to use. I started by asking if she set permissions on the apps she downloaded. She looked at me blankly, "What permissions?". I proceeded to show her how you can granularly control what you allow each app to do on your phone and what access it is allowed. Her head blew up, she had no idea any of this existed and after gong through a few menus, she didn't care any more. It was all too complicated and too much to think about for a busy mum.
This is why governments unfortunately are having to try to protect people from themselves. As tech competent people it all seems so simple to us, but we need to remember the majority of the population just click 'Allow All' and blow past all permission and security questions as they have no idea what any of it means.
I haven't set up an Android in a while, but, I doubt it's massively different.
When restoring factory defaults, the same question, just in case the phone is sold, gifted, stolen or whatever.
If you are going to give a phone to a minor you should set that option right from the start.
THIS
Holy shit. This is such an obvious fix. And it shuts up those surveillance state goons immediately.
My God, why have we tried to summon up the ghost of 1984 when such a simple fix as this will do.
Parents can lock devices into "child mode" that emits "user is child" headers. Websites can then block.
The blast radius is zero.
Good God, we need to fast track this into browsers right now. If we hurry we might be able to point to this as the technical fix.
Once some of the infrastructure exists, OS vendors can hook into it.
Firefox devs - please do this right now. Please spearhead this.
I might have to vibe code an advocacy site for the spec and set up a GitHub / RFC process.
I've long since considered that the efforts for online child safety should be pointed at educating parents and spearheading some kind of certification of compliance for child safety of software and websites.
[this product is certified to adhere to EU:CSA]
Then you can block everything not certified, and the software that does the blocking would also be certified, the two major prongs you need (endpoints and sites working together: else they're blocked). The rest of the money goes to education for parents about this fact, and the dangers of not doing it, and how to do it.
This is super "easy" (when comparing to the effort it would take for putting backdoors in everything).
Which is why I think that the reason is definitely not child safety, and more about crime control.
Me talking about UK blocking people unless they ID themselves in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979295
Me talking about how its disingenuous because we have superior technical solutions to this particular issue last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010902
Need to look up a bus time? Full screen cookie consent with accept buttons drawn OFF THE SCREEN.
> ...
> You may think that EU privacy law requires cookie banners. But the law is clear: online tracking is prohibited by default.
That's an excellent idea... lets see how its implemented on https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en
Oh... there's a cookie banner.
In the UK a few news sites have changed cookie banners to "you can accept and see this stuff for free, or you can sign up for a subscription, which would you prefer?". It's the only time I hit accept (and then clear browser history).
If blanket preferences from browser signals became the norm, a segment might open up where you would configure preferences and a data broker would make sure you get something in return for your data. At minimum it might force paywalled publishers to consider that as a "lite" subscription option.
ads don't require invasve and pervasive tracking
(see e.g. https://iapp.org/news/a/cjeu-clarifies-cookie-consent-requir... https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/edpb-consent-or-pay-models-s... )
They did not read the text to agree.
It was the fastest way to get the banner to go away. Sometimes they force you to confirm multiple times if you click ”none” or ”minimal”.
I know it seems like you could work around this with careful design and maybe focus groups and such, but I can tell you we regularly uncover surprising insights from (aggregate) trends in front-end events.
So now they'd have a new popup that says "reconfigure your browser to accept tracking, or pay us, or you can't access the page". Which isn't really an improvement.
Sounds good, as long as it covers the "legitimate interest" bollocks⁰ that is often hidden in inconvenient UI nests as well as the basic preference.
-------
[0] "we see your preference not to be stalked, but we want to anyway, click again for every partner to reconfirm you don't want them following you around"
Sites that easily allow you to simply reject everything are then a short hop, skip and a jump into browser settings where you auto-reject all cookie/tracking nonsense
An easier step forward could be to make the too often present ridiculous use of dark patterns and endless process to express your lack of consent illegal (and issue colossal fines…)
I guess that most companies just chuck it up there as a default so they dont have to read the law, or maybe they are all actually harvesting and selling personal data and therefore require cookies? Who knows.
I think most companies just don't give a fuck about user privacy and therefor have to show one. There are of course exceptions. But I don't know how many of them have been actual (for-profit) companies.
50% that, and 50% that way more companies than you expect are harvesting and profiting from your data.
That has been my guess as well. If you run npm install half-the-internet you have no idea what's in there, so just slap on that cookie banner for good measure. Of course the real problem is not knowing what's inside your application, but the thought process is "eh, if a blanket cookie banner does the job then that's good enough for me".
On our go-live form there’s a question “do you use cookies” and it’s yes/no. If you say yes legal block the site from going live without the pre approved cookie banner…
I mean that both in the sense of "you, plural" (your company should fix that) and "you, personally" (because diffusion of responsibility is a real issue, and someone needs to actually do it).
Just checking, you do know that still counts as tracking and may fall under GDPR rules? GDPR was never just about cookies.
Overall this is a common sense solution. The challenge is that a significant industry makes money by collecting and selling data. It makes it harder for businesses who depend on it, they are going to get creative and will eventually come up with some dark pattern to circumvent it.
> Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner.
Fortunately, if you have uBlock Origin, you can enable Easylist cookie notices under annoyances and avoid most of them. Combine with blocking third-party cookies, and the problem pretty much disappears.
The fact that the EU tried to regulate this stuff is a shame, because regulation is not a good remedy. End-users have agency here. The solution is to enable end-users to have control in their browser (which they always did, so it's an issue of education, like so many things).
Shame that Google is trying to kill uBO though. Extremely pleased that Brave continues to support it.
The Do Not Track header is the only technology needed. The rest is compelling companies to obey it.
Another good one to have the "hide Youtube shorts" filter, featured on HN a while back.
Also I wanna know when websites don't give a shit about my privacy and therefor have to show a cookie banner. While theoretically not consenting should mean not collecting blocking it altogether and modifying page content might mean "all bets are off". If the website expects you to have made a decision that might wrongly consider it consent.
Consent-O-Matic says "I don't consent".
It wasn't on EU Commission to "finally propose a solution". The soluton has always been there.
Somehow, Google, aka world's largest tracking and advertising company incidentally making the worlds' dominant browser and completely dominating all web standards, couldn't be bothered, and instead was pushing crap like FLoC
Consent-O-Matic -> automated configuration to your preferences using the dialog provided.
I still don't care about cookies -> least privacy friendliest option, because it may opt into undesired tracking (its goal is just to remove the annoyance of the dialogs)
I've wanted the option to select your cookie preferences once and forget in a brower for ever.
I assume the reason this wasn't done initially was corporate pressure (most people would opt-out of everything by default).
1.2 billion exposed users × 8.17 years×365×3 banners/day×4 seconds÷36 is roughly 10-15 billion human hours lost to dealing with damn cookies since GDPR took effect on May 2018.
That's about 17,000 human lives.
I don't want randomnewssite to track me. But a favorite online store...I do want help with recommendations.
It's easier to click a single button than hunt for how to create/access an account for the brand.
Ironically, this has the effect of cookie banners reappearing every time because they cannot place a cookie that says that you have rejected them.
Unfortunately this means you have to view a lot of the web through archive.today or web.archive.org - I would know because I have uMatrix configured this way.
-> not really sensible
Just step back and ask yourself what each side of that debate is trying to achieve and why. What is motivating them? Why are they motivated in that way?
Don't just recite what you "know", think, look, research, figure it out. It might sound good to have a one-liner like this in your back pocket, but do you really believe it after looking at the publicly available information that it is their real intention to conduct a "crusade to destroy the internet"?
It's great. The current law forces people that don't give a shit about user privacy to have a banner (or any other way of asking for consent first) while giving everyone that cares and everyone not wanting to spy on their visitor a free pass.
Cookies were never a problem. Just get rid of the banner.
This other legislation should pass/fail on its own merit.