Banner gets a lot of attention because of the never-ending annoyance it's causing. It's like being surprised that someone would care about something so small as a little rock in their shoe. Yeah, you care about these little things.
It is also definitely true that the regulations are largely written by people who do not understand the tech they're regulating and its potential. Again, not some weird controversial point.
With every next leak where my full name, PESEL (that's like SSN here in Poland), email, phone number become semi-public and... nothing happens, I am becoming more convinced that we are annoying ourselves for nothing. Just degrading our digital lives and generating tons of legal digital text no one reads for no benefit of anyone involved.
At the same time, the very people who pretend to defend my privacy, oppose Tor, Signal, anonymity online, and other tools that definitely benefit me.
I think GDPR is more good than bad, but the author's example of surveillance capitalism is easily repeated on most EU news sites. Visit bild.de and watch the network inspector light up like a christmas tree. Do you really feel your privacy is being respected?
The 996 partners banner is just the piss take that supposedly makes this legal.
> It is also definitely true that the regulations are largely written by people who do not understand the tech
I kind of switched side on this after the silicon valley made it clear that they are in the king making business, and the kings they want are of the fascistic and not benevolent kind. Also, a big aspect of the "tech culture" (beyond the silicon valley itself) has been about focussing on what could be done rather than whether it should, and this "restraint" must come from "outside the tech bubble".
The purpose of GDPR was never data protection or privacy. It was designed to legitimise data trade and give corporations legal basis for selling and processing the data where before that it was a grey area. If you look at it through that lens, it will make sense.
Regulators are just a potemkin village thing to make it look like the law is serving ordinary person.
As a dual American-European (citizenship in both, lived in both) I celebrate the EU data privacy laws and lament the absolute lack of protection of data or privacy that prevails in the US. Because of US based websites the genealogical history of my extended family (to many degrees), my past US residence history, etc. are easily available online, while in the EU it is very difficult to obtain any information online whatsoever about me or my immediate family (based in the EU), where we live, or even what we do for a living.
Most of the websites that are bad (operationally) in the GDPR sense are based in the US or represent US based entities. It is primarily US based entities that engage in bad faith fake compliance.
All this reflects the complete deterioration of basic business ethics in the US that has been led by the piracy culture that dominates in the tech sector, where the mentality is to bend or break every rule as much as possible, suffer the fines as business cost, and so on.
I disagree with several points, but you already made clear that you are right and I'm wrong, and so there's no point in debating anything. Must be nice to know everything
Meta, but what’s the point of engaging in a discussion forum and writing a comment only to back out of actually discussing the points you disagree with?
It's a social manoeuvre, the idea is basically like standing up and clapping to show support. For example, maybe someone wants to support/oppose a position but is genuinely not the sort of person who believes in making an argument. From that perspective a little public "I disagree and question your character" post is an obvious tactic. The idea isn't to make a point so there isn't normally much reason to respond.
The reasoning treats a correlated characteristic as a causal mechanism.
successful person → unusual trait
And infer:
unusual trait → success
The most popular example of this in tech (that never seems to die) is when people notice moments where Steve Jobs was an asshole, or he said no directly to customers, and infer they need to be more like this because it's the unusual trait they're missing and need to emulate.
FDR's hatred was a byproduct of his consequential actions. But consequential actions are not the only things that produce hatred. In fact, rather petty actions can cause someone to feel hatred.
If you use hatred as a proxy for importance, you are effectively saying: "All impactful people are hated, therefore all hated people are impactful." This is logically equivalent to saying "All dogs are animals, therefore all animals are dogs." The metric has zero predictive power because the set of "hated people" is vastly larger than the set of "impactful people."
Friction is also terrible metric for progress. I would argue privacy has actually gotten worse due to the banners because if you decide you're not going to sign in to do something like a Google search (so it's not tied to your account), then you're immediately punished with a nag box. So you actually decide you'd rather stay signed in so you don't get nagged. Even if you're in favour of using the government, you should be using friction as a counter-signal. For example, switching to the Euro, reduced friction. Standardising to USB-C, you could argue this reduces friction for consumers.
TFA talks exclusively about being hated by the right people. If you are only hated by the right people (yes, I made an adjustment there), it's probalby not because you are a jerk. Come on.
I dunno, recently traveling through Europe I mentally “joined” the campaign by seeing the ridiculousness for myself.
I very much support their ideals and their people-centered mindset.
But in execution it’s that meme: US rocket lands in slow motion on reusable pad, Chinese rocket lands in slow motion on reusable pad, European hand in slow motion closes a water bottle cap that is permanently attached to the bottle and always hits you in the nose.
Especially Gruber is getting really tiresome. Almost devolving into a “look at them there fruity Yuropeeans with their healthcare and holidays”-level of tech commentary about any minor roadbump big-US-tech encounters in the EU.
No (what I’m fairly sure is being referred to is that) there are (very recent) significant additional barriers to trade between EU member states, which disproportionately impact small businesses.
I don't think so. The most natural reading of OP's post is that they are outside Europe. You wouldn't say "I can't imagine how much this affects small business in Europe" if you were yourself running a small business in Europe.
Ok, but their post talks about making a product in small volumes. It doesn't explicitly say that it's a small business, but together with the first person singular language, that's definitely the impression given.
There are many powerful actors in whose interests it is to spread FUD about the EU, and none of those entities have the average citizen’s best interests in mind.
Maybe it’s all a misinformation campaign… or maybe even people who live in, recognise and benefit from the good sides of the European experience, can also legitimately criticise bad aspects? It’s not binary - there are shades of grey.
Tobacco control advocates sometimes referred to a "scream test": the more vigorously the industry opposed a measure, the more likely that the measure was effective.
Yeah but don't tobacco control advocates want to kill the tobacco industry? We don't want to kill the tech industry - surely the tech industry's pain is widely felt sometimes.
As someone who, until recently, worked in a company heavily impacted by GDPR, it’s a good thing. It forced the mindset away from “just do whatever is easiest,” to considering how it affects where our customer’s data is stored.
Was it a PITA? Sometimes, yes.
Was it stressful having a conversation with Legal to determine whether we had a PII leak under the GDPR terms that would mean we had to reach out to customers? Definitely.
But you know what? That’s the cost of doing business. The outcome for EU citizens was that their data is in a better place than it otherwise would have been. And that’s a good thing.
Well, it's the cost of collecting data. A lot of businesses don't really need to collect data. It's only the cost of doing business if you are in the personal data business.
For example, a newspaper or a blog have absolutely no reason to produce a cookie banner.
I worked in a small startup in Berlin and I remember we used to have a person dedicated to handle GDPR stuff. She had to go to Berlin data authority periodically and report status. I was really surprised given how small the company was, why we needed a dedicated person to handle all the bureaucracy. Apparently it was the law.
Also with the new package law in EU. I believe all these laws are how EU creates employment for their citizens. With almost every law they introduce, another new position is created in private as well as government offices and in a slowly aging continent that’s a good way to keep people employed when there isn’t much of a prospect
I think there will be more small businesses that would be created to handle all the package regulations and they will provide it as a service to all those businesses. I agree that it’s another unnecessary layer of bureaucracy, but maybe that was the intention of the lawmakers
I feel that this must be logical error related to ad hominem and fallacy of composition, instead of this is bad because bad people like it, this is good because bad people dislike it.
Cookie banners are made annoying on purpose. This has nothing to do with GDPR itself.
The entities forced to show them would rather not, and thus make it as annoying as possible for you. They then use this to weaken support for the GDPR.
Note that GDPR did not mandate the cookie banners we see everywhere today. Those are a form of malicious compliance. Their goal is not to conform to regulation but to undermine the regulation itself in the eyes of the public.
The cookie banners come from the earlier ePrivacy Directive, and while it was possible to comply by not storing cookies at all, if you want to store data on the user's browser you do need to get their consent, hence the cookie banner.
> if you want to store data on the user's browser you do need to get their consent, hence the cookie banner.
No - you need consent for storing cookies that are not “strictly necessary”. I can implement an offline app that stores data in cookies without consent. The current usage of the banner is overly litigious US focused simplification combined with malicious compliance.
in particular, if you store stuff in the browser, and don't send it to the server later (local storage or one of the other 1000 JS APIs), there is no reason to present a cookie banner.
The ePrivacy directive basically defines it as 'any data your site gives to the user's terminal that the terminal then passes back to your site'. Request tokens in the URL would qualify, but notably storing something in localStorage with javascript that is never sent back would not.
For a programmer of some sort this may seem a meaningless exception, for a lawyer it is not.
I am not a lawyer, but I have had a few law classes and worked a bunch in the legal services branch. If I am asked legally speaking - is this cookie strictly necessary? I will ask is the cookie used only for the purposes of the service provided to the user and which the user expects to get.
If the cookie is used so that when the user logs in and goes to page two of the article they are reading they can read that article without having to log in again we can say it is needed for the service. If the cookie is used to provide recommendations for other articles by using their user history to compare with other user histories and what other users like to read it is not needed for the service. Although from the point of view of the company it sure might be nice to have.
If the cookie is used for your state management of the items you have placed in your basket so that you can go to buy those items it is needed, if the cookie is used to look up your past history and give you recommendations for other stuff to put in your basket, things you bought in the past why not buy some more of those, or how often you rated products you bought badly or anything not required for the current transaction you are doing to go smoothly it is not needed.
As a general rule lawyers and the courts are good at sorting this stuff out, but as edge cases get complicated so does code, and nobody wants to handle all that stuff themselves, so instead they pay for a company that develops cookie banners and everybody gets asked if they accept cookies or not.
You don't need explicit consent for functional cookies, e.g. a session cookie or to store what preferences the user has selected on your settings page. It is implicitly given by the user telling you to treat them a certain way. For that you just need a notice somewhere on the page that reads along the lines of "this website uses cookies". It can be an unobtrusive note in your footer.
You do need consent even for the necessary exemption in practice because of how that is defined; the user must have explicitly asked for the function that requires the cookie:
> strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service *explicitly requested* by the subscriber or user to provide the service.
But this the basis for the OK-only style of banner, to inform the user that certain functions require and will use cookies if they use those functions.
The banner is not needed for the website to work, otherwise how would the "decline" button work? They can store cookies, otherwise how would they remember your choice? They can track a functional session just fine, full shopping cart and checkout if they want.
What they can't do, not without your opt-in consent, is track the fuck out of you. Non-functional tracking. Analytical tracking. Behavioural tracking. Tying that tracking to an identity. Selling the data about that identity's behaviour to advertisers, to data brokers, to whoever pays.
The banner gets in your face and loudly prefers you press "accept" because if you do -- $$$$ CA-CHING!!! $$$$ -- they now have your opt-in consent to sell visitor data.
It is. It’s also often not necessary at all. You can’t do things with people’s data without either getting consent or basically having a good reason to. I like the ICO pages (uk regulator) for explaining a lot of things like this.
If I’m shipping an item to someone I don’t have to ask them if I can keep their address for long enough to send them the item. I do need their permission to use that data to send them marketing though, or sell it on. If you have to legally keep records for X years that’s fine.
Keep only what you need, for the time you need to keep it, in an appropriately secure way.
Even the EU's own government websites are polluted with the same cookie banners. Are they "maliciously compliant" with their own regulations? Are they trying to "undermine the regulation itself"?
I’ve posted this before. I was working on a website where we used a single cookie for an auth token, and we logged absolutely _everything_ on the server side (we didn’t sell it FWIW). When it came to publishing the site, we went to legal for our parent company and filled in their form. One question was “do you use cookies”, to which we answered truthfully. That site has a cookie banner, and absolutely 0 mention of the piles of telemetry we gathered.
The ePrivacy directive is a waste of time, money, attention and resources and I wish we spent that effort on complying with GDPR instead which is much much better.
GDPR itself is quite a good law. It's implementation and enforcement are not.
E.g. the nag problem would have been solved simply and effectively with something like do-not-track header (probably as OS setting, as apps are often even worse than websites with tracking). Also enforcement of obvious violations taking years and years, especially against large corporations, means it's just violated all the time.
EU also failed to give good interpretation guidelines early on, causing massive piles of overjealous lawyer CYA red tape and just silly stuff like removing names from apartment buzzers.
The do-not-track header is a nice idea but could never have worked. The GDPR is based on the idea that you can only store certain data about users if you have their consent to do so. Bearing in mind that most users have no idea what a header is and no idea how to configure their browsers, a user simply not sending a particular header does not imply consent to store information beyond that which is absolutely necessary for use of the site.
I take your point. It would be nice to have a header that effectively just automatically canceled all the consent pop ups for you. But there are still some issues.
1) You'd have to find a way of writing the regulations without baking in particular technical assumptions about the web. The current GDPR talks about general principles of consent and data processing, not the specifics of cookies, headers, etc.
2) People can change their minds or override their general preferences in specific instances. Just because someone has a default setting in their browser indicating that they don't want to accept tracking cookies doesn't necessarily mean that they won't want to allow your site to store more data about them. So it is still legitimate for sites to ask them the question – and then you're back to the pop ups.
Given the relatively recent European experience (Nazis and Communists, among others) there is a reasonable argument for data privacy even if it hampers economic growth. However...
> If the rules are so terrible, why did nobody choose market exit?
Because major players don't particularly mind such rules; the public doesn't care about their data all that much and everything will tick on as usual with some nag banners and compliance officers.
The problem is the major players aren't going to be European because it is no longer legal for EU companies to get started by doing what the US companies did to get started. There is a reason the EU is backseat driving US software companies - EU industrial policy killed off the EU ones in the crib (to be fair that wasn't the GDPR, the GDPR is just part of the same anti-growth regulatory pattern). They died so young we've never really even learned what their names would have been.
EDIT I'll point at companies like Uber. It looked pretty illegal for most of its early years, until it could afford enough lobbyists to legalise its business model. Never would have worked in the EU.
>The problem is the major players aren't going to be European because it is no longer legal for EU companies to get started by doing what the US companies did to get started
essentially finding ways around the law and its spirit to screw people over and degrade the quality of life for the citizens to one's own benefit. Your edit pointing to Uber never working is pretty much making the case here.
If someone hates something doesnt mean that the other thing is good, thats a bizarre assumption. Im all for GDPR but has it helped stopped our data truly getting out? No just look at social media companies using subversive tactics.
At a previous job, I didn't have a company phone when I got set up, so when I signed up for a tool we all used, I used my real phone number. Unfortunately it was an American company, and from that day FOR YEARS I got spam calls, which I never got before.
I can't prove it was them, but it feels like I got too naive because there was never trouble giving my real number to services...
GDPR is good for corporations because it legitimises data trade. Population trained to agree to cookies now also agree to data processing just to get the banner go away and corporations have legal basis to process and sell the data.
It is all working as intended.
The tell tale is bodies like ICO being powerless when it comes to enforcing it. You've been screwed by big corporation? ICO will shrug.
I hate the banners and the ugliness too but they are designed precisely to do that, and adtech maneuvers to ensure the hate is directed at the wrong source - the lawmakers instead of the people doing all the spying.
GDPR 1.1 should address all that - no legitimate interest exclusion of any kind, ONE SINGLE CLICK to reject all, no witholding service at ANY degree unless consent is granted, a 3rd option (I offer to pay to not be tracked), and a mandatory disclaimer on the cookie banner saying in clear terms: "Tracking is spying. If we were not tracking you and invading your privacy, this banner would not be necessary at all". Maybe even revive the "do not track" header by mandating that websites react to it accordingly, obey it 100%, not even show a banner if the header already tells them what to do, and ask users if they want this set or not, without a default value which would give an excuse for complaint from the people spying on you.
I also read the post, and have handled multiple GPDR adjacent migrations in Asia.
The end result is still the same, even with GDPR 1.1, another interstitial barrier between the user and whatever site they are trying to reach imposed by a poorly planned attempt to protect user privacy while simultaneously enabling the predatory companies who violate said privacy to continue business as usual.
The cookie banner will remain on the vast majority of sites, and users will spam click past it as they have been trained to do.
Treating the browser's "disable cookies" feature as a way to reject consent is not real consent. That cripples many legitimate use cases outright; it's neither accessible nor understandable by normal users; it's a technical defence measure, not a way to consciously reject contractual consent.
In contrast, the GDPR demands that you properly ask for consent if you want to process somebody's personal information, inform them why that is necessary, and only process the data if they agree to the processing.
There is clearly a difference here, and IMHO the EU is quite correct here.
US companies like Meta or Google __LOVE__ GDPR. It is quagmire of complicated rules, and small startups will get burried under this quick sand. Large corporations can maintain departments of lawyers, and navigate this legal minefield. Small fines are cost of doing business, bribe that goverment would not force monopolies to spkit!
Try to do marketing ad campaign as small eshop owner in EU!
I'm responsible for GDPR in a small European company that processes fairly sensitive data. It's not that complicated as people like you make it out to be - if you're willing to actually try to do the right thing.
I am trying to run profitable business, not to "do the right think"! My shop had 5% profit margin and fimal net profit was bellow minimal salary! I do not have a money to hire "ethical compliance officer!"
GDPR is easy to implement once, but it is constantly changing every year. Keeping up with regulations is constant energy drain.
And small mistakes are punished by heavy fines (thousands of EUR). If you compare fines Meta is getting by revenue, small business should get maybe 10 euro fine for violations (not thousands).
You don’t need to hire such a person since you’re way too small for the thresholds. And besides, if you’re unable to accept that you have a social responsibility when you run a business, I don’t know what to tell you?
You also have to keep up with other regulations; that’s the price of doing business. And the churn you’re talking about is way less than you make it to be; it’s not like there is change every month.
We never even once got fined, because we try our best to only store data we need, not track users, and secure the data we have to store as well as we can.
If you indeed do end up with authorities auditing your business, they absolutely value if you’ve tried your best as opposed to not caring at all; I’ve seen that multiple times with friends in various places .
If that were the case they'd have spend money on supporting GDPR rather than sending armies of lobbyists to Brussels in an attempt to prevent it, or attempting to turn the US president in an attack dog on their behalf.
This generic libertarian talking point "companies love regulations!" is routinely disproved by how companies behave. As the article points out, you know what is good by who hates it.
Microsoft also hated windows piracy and "fought" against it, later they admitted it helped their business.
As for "libertarian talking point", it is survivor bios. There are very little tech compenies left in EU. Heavy regulation burden is one of the reasons.
All EU companies that could hate GSPR are gone, and their would be owners are just random people on internet.
GDPR has one single goal - to allow aggregated presumably anonymous data markets. Period. Everything else surrounding it is diversion in a plain sight.
Cookie banners are already obsolete in the age of AI. Who is wasting time defending it? People don't even care to hate GDPR these days, it's an anacrhonistic regulation from a different era that some EUrocrats like to boast about
I do! It’s one of my favorite regulation ever. I find it very well researched and designed, in a world where it often feels we cannot change the status quo it’s really impressive that a community of countries as messy as the EU has been able to design, pass, and actually implemented such a complex and citizen-centered set of rules
Often complaints about it boil down to either not understanding what’s in it, or annoyances that would be solved if sites stopped doing all this shady stuff. “We value your data, our 1644 partners…” yeah you definitely have a value you assign to my data.
The point of the article is not that banners are good; it’s that they would not be needed at all if websites didn’t share all the possible data about their users with hundreds of vendors.
Fun fact: the OP blog doesn’t display a GPDR banner.
It is also definitely true that the regulations are largely written by people who do not understand the tech they're regulating and its potential. Again, not some weird controversial point.
With every next leak where my full name, PESEL (that's like SSN here in Poland), email, phone number become semi-public and... nothing happens, I am becoming more convinced that we are annoying ourselves for nothing. Just degrading our digital lives and generating tons of legal digital text no one reads for no benefit of anyone involved.
At the same time, the very people who pretend to defend my privacy, oppose Tor, Signal, anonymity online, and other tools that definitely benefit me.
The 996 partners banner is just the piss take that supposedly makes this legal.
I kind of switched side on this after the silicon valley made it clear that they are in the king making business, and the kings they want are of the fascistic and not benevolent kind. Also, a big aspect of the "tech culture" (beyond the silicon valley itself) has been about focussing on what could be done rather than whether it should, and this "restraint" must come from "outside the tech bubble".
Regulators are just a potemkin village thing to make it look like the law is serving ordinary person.
Most of the websites that are bad (operationally) in the GDPR sense are based in the US or represent US based entities. It is primarily US based entities that engage in bad faith fake compliance.
All this reflects the complete deterioration of basic business ethics in the US that has been led by the piracy culture that dominates in the tech sector, where the mentality is to bend or break every rule as much as possible, suffer the fines as business cost, and so on.
successful person → unusual trait And infer: unusual trait → success
The most popular example of this in tech (that never seems to die) is when people notice moments where Steve Jobs was an asshole, or he said no directly to customers, and infer they need to be more like this because it's the unusual trait they're missing and need to emulate.
FDR's hatred was a byproduct of his consequential actions. But consequential actions are not the only things that produce hatred. In fact, rather petty actions can cause someone to feel hatred.
If you use hatred as a proxy for importance, you are effectively saying: "All impactful people are hated, therefore all hated people are impactful." This is logically equivalent to saying "All dogs are animals, therefore all animals are dogs." The metric has zero predictive power because the set of "hated people" is vastly larger than the set of "impactful people."
Friction is also terrible metric for progress. I would argue privacy has actually gotten worse due to the banners because if you decide you're not going to sign in to do something like a Google search (so it's not tied to your account), then you're immediately punished with a nag box. So you actually decide you'd rather stay signed in so you don't get nagged. Even if you're in favour of using the government, you should be using friction as a counter-signal. For example, switching to the Euro, reduced friction. Standardising to USB-C, you could argue this reduces friction for consumers.
I very much support their ideals and their people-centered mindset.
But in execution it’s that meme: US rocket lands in slow motion on reusable pad, Chinese rocket lands in slow motion on reusable pad, European hand in slow motion closes a water bottle cap that is permanently attached to the bottle and always hits you in the nose.
If I made millions, sure, pay someone to figure it out.
But I was not going to waste design time early on.
I can't imagine how much this affects small business in Europe.
Also, their other posts suggest they are in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477186
In fact,eu commission and parliament are Meta's biggest political spenders in most EU countries.
https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/?source=onboardi...
Personally i find this type of knee-jerk reaction to any discussion about the EU suspicious
Was it a PITA? Sometimes, yes.
Was it stressful having a conversation with Legal to determine whether we had a PII leak under the GDPR terms that would mean we had to reach out to customers? Definitely.
But you know what? That’s the cost of doing business. The outcome for EU citizens was that their data is in a better place than it otherwise would have been. And that’s a good thing.
For example, a newspaper or a blog have absolutely no reason to produce a cookie banner.
Also with the new package law in EU. I believe all these laws are how EU creates employment for their citizens. With almost every law they introduce, another new position is created in private as well as government offices and in a slowly aging continent that’s a good way to keep people employed when there isn’t much of a prospect
That said I am generally happy with GDPR.
The entities forced to show them would rather not, and thus make it as annoying as possible for you. They then use this to weaken support for the GDPR.
Shame on the people making stuff like this.
> if you want to store data on the user's browser you do need to get their consent, hence the cookie banner.
No - you need consent for storing cookies that are not “strictly necessary”. I can implement an offline app that stores data in cookies without consent. The current usage of the banner is overly litigious US focused simplification combined with malicious compliance.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
For a programmer of some sort this may seem a meaningless exception, for a lawyer it is not.
I am not a lawyer, but I have had a few law classes and worked a bunch in the legal services branch. If I am asked legally speaking - is this cookie strictly necessary? I will ask is the cookie used only for the purposes of the service provided to the user and which the user expects to get.
If the cookie is used so that when the user logs in and goes to page two of the article they are reading they can read that article without having to log in again we can say it is needed for the service. If the cookie is used to provide recommendations for other articles by using their user history to compare with other user histories and what other users like to read it is not needed for the service. Although from the point of view of the company it sure might be nice to have.
If the cookie is used for your state management of the items you have placed in your basket so that you can go to buy those items it is needed, if the cookie is used to look up your past history and give you recommendations for other stuff to put in your basket, things you bought in the past why not buy some more of those, or how often you rated products you bought badly or anything not required for the current transaction you are doing to go smoothly it is not needed.
As a general rule lawyers and the courts are good at sorting this stuff out, but as edge cases get complicated so does code, and nobody wants to handle all that stuff themselves, so instead they pay for a company that develops cookie banners and everybody gets asked if they accept cookies or not.
> strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service *explicitly requested* by the subscriber or user to provide the service.
But this the basis for the OK-only style of banner, to inform the user that certain functions require and will use cookies if they use those functions.
If each page you browse on the shopping site shows what's currently in your basket -- explicitly requested.
If you checkout and get a list of what's in the basket and give you card details for payment and email for receipt -- explicitly requested.
No consent needed.
On the other hand, deliberately analysing log data after the fact for which products they looked at but didn't add to cart -- consent needed.
Javascript measuring which sub-parts of the page they lingered on -- consent needed.
Tracking how often they come back without buying anything -- consent needed.
Using the email address for anything other than order receipt and delivery status -- CONSENT VERY MUCH FUCKING NEEDED.
See the difference?
You do if you want to track your users. Very different thing.
What they can't do, not without your opt-in consent, is track the fuck out of you. Non-functional tracking. Analytical tracking. Behavioural tracking. Tying that tracking to an identity. Selling the data about that identity's behaviour to advertisers, to data brokers, to whoever pays.
The banner gets in your face and loudly prefers you press "accept" because if you do -- $$$$ CA-CHING!!! $$$$ -- they now have your opt-in consent to sell visitor data.
Because if it is, I also want to do it that way.
If I’m shipping an item to someone I don’t have to ask them if I can keep their address for long enough to send them the item. I do need their permission to use that data to send them marketing though, or sell it on. If you have to legally keep records for X years that’s fine.
Keep only what you need, for the time you need to keep it, in an appropriately secure way.
https://european-union.europa.eu/
The ePrivacy directive is a waste of time, money, attention and resources and I wish we spent that effort on complying with GDPR instead which is much much better.
E.g. the nag problem would have been solved simply and effectively with something like do-not-track header (probably as OS setting, as apps are often even worse than websites with tracking). Also enforcement of obvious violations taking years and years, especially against large corporations, means it's just violated all the time.
EU also failed to give good interpretation guidelines early on, causing massive piles of overjealous lawyer CYA red tape and just silly stuff like removing names from apartment buzzers.
1) You'd have to find a way of writing the regulations without baking in particular technical assumptions about the web. The current GDPR talks about general principles of consent and data processing, not the specifics of cookies, headers, etc.
2) People can change their minds or override their general preferences in specific instances. Just because someone has a default setting in their browser indicating that they don't want to accept tracking cookies doesn't necessarily mean that they won't want to allow your site to store more data about them. So it is still legitimate for sites to ask them the question – and then you're back to the pop ups.
> If the rules are so terrible, why did nobody choose market exit?
Because major players don't particularly mind such rules; the public doesn't care about their data all that much and everything will tick on as usual with some nag banners and compliance officers.
The problem is the major players aren't going to be European because it is no longer legal for EU companies to get started by doing what the US companies did to get started. There is a reason the EU is backseat driving US software companies - EU industrial policy killed off the EU ones in the crib (to be fair that wasn't the GDPR, the GDPR is just part of the same anti-growth regulatory pattern). They died so young we've never really even learned what their names would have been.
EDIT I'll point at companies like Uber. It looked pretty illegal for most of its early years, until it could afford enough lobbyists to legalise its business model. Never would have worked in the EU.
essentially finding ways around the law and its spirit to screw people over and degrade the quality of life for the citizens to one's own benefit. Your edit pointing to Uber never working is pretty much making the case here.
At a previous job, I didn't have a company phone when I got set up, so when I signed up for a tool we all used, I used my real phone number. Unfortunately it was an American company, and from that day FOR YEARS I got spam calls, which I never got before.
I can't prove it was them, but it feels like I got too naive because there was never trouble giving my real number to services...
It is all working as intended.
The tell tale is bodies like ICO being powerless when it comes to enforcing it. You've been screwed by big corporation? ICO will shrug.
The web has gotten so much uglier as a result of GDPR.
We measure our success based on enquiries, orders and so on, not the number of hits to the website.
I hate the banners and the ugliness too but they are designed precisely to do that, and adtech maneuvers to ensure the hate is directed at the wrong source - the lawmakers instead of the people doing all the spying.
GDPR 1.1 should address all that - no legitimate interest exclusion of any kind, ONE SINGLE CLICK to reject all, no witholding service at ANY degree unless consent is granted, a 3rd option (I offer to pay to not be tracked), and a mandatory disclaimer on the cookie banner saying in clear terms: "Tracking is spying. If we were not tracking you and invading your privacy, this banner would not be necessary at all". Maybe even revive the "do not track" header by mandating that websites react to it accordingly, obey it 100%, not even show a banner if the header already tells them what to do, and ask users if they want this set or not, without a default value which would give an excuse for complaint from the people spying on you.
The end result is still the same, even with GDPR 1.1, another interstitial barrier between the user and whatever site they are trying to reach imposed by a poorly planned attempt to protect user privacy while simultaneously enabling the predatory companies who violate said privacy to continue business as usual.
The cookie banner will remain on the vast majority of sites, and users will spam click past it as they have been trained to do.
I remember thinking "ok once this hits an actual web spec, we should see this built into browsers, and sent as headers or something"
Nope
In contrast, the GDPR demands that you properly ask for consent if you want to process somebody's personal information, inform them why that is necessary, and only process the data if they agree to the processing.
There is clearly a difference here, and IMHO the EU is quite correct here.
If it wasn't cookies it would be something else.
Try to do marketing ad campaign as small eshop owner in EU!
GDPR is easy to implement once, but it is constantly changing every year. Keeping up with regulations is constant energy drain. And small mistakes are punished by heavy fines (thousands of EUR). If you compare fines Meta is getting by revenue, small business should get maybe 10 euro fine for violations (not thousands).
You also have to keep up with other regulations; that’s the price of doing business. And the churn you’re talking about is way less than you make it to be; it’s not like there is change every month.
We never even once got fined, because we try our best to only store data we need, not track users, and secure the data we have to store as well as we can.
If you indeed do end up with authorities auditing your business, they absolutely value if you’ve tried your best as opposed to not caring at all; I’ve seen that multiple times with friends in various places .
If that were the case they'd have spend money on supporting GDPR rather than sending armies of lobbyists to Brussels in an attempt to prevent it, or attempting to turn the US president in an attack dog on their behalf.
This generic libertarian talking point "companies love regulations!" is routinely disproved by how companies behave. As the article points out, you know what is good by who hates it.
As for "libertarian talking point", it is survivor bios. There are very little tech compenies left in EU. Heavy regulation burden is one of the reasons.
All EU companies that could hate GSPR are gone, and their would be owners are just random people on internet.
I do! It’s one of my favorite regulation ever. I find it very well researched and designed, in a world where it often feels we cannot change the status quo it’s really impressive that a community of countries as messy as the EU has been able to design, pass, and actually implemented such a complex and citizen-centered set of rules
Fun fact: the OP blog doesn’t display a GPDR banner.
I'm a "deny all cookies" if it's an option, but I won't waste time on "customize".
Reminds me of 9/11 security theater