Comment by glitchcrab
14 days ago
What an utterly ridiculous response. In your eyes, businesses should be able to run roughshod over the consumer? Yes, maybe the laws could have been more polished or have been implemented in a better way, but the underlying idea of protecting the consumer is the important takeaway from these laws.
>What an utterly ridiculous response.
To be fair to them, i think it was sarcasm.
You may well be right, or at least I hope you are anyway.
On HN, you can be sure there are several people who literally believe the world would be better without any regulations or laws forcing businesses to do anything. This place is the pinnacle of anarcho-capitalism.
at least here there's a spectrum of views that largely get by peacefully, and the entire place isn't focused on that conflict, a la twitter. yes there are lot of right-wing headcases entirely taken up by their own bottom-line, and yes the place itself is broadly funded and owned by people who think like, or at the very least, act like anarcho-capitalists, but they only really float to the surface when a post about regulation comes up, and even then, the discussion stays mostly civil. it could be a lot worse
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Poe's Law applies
to also be fair, I just recently returned from Europe and I was shocked at how maddeningly frustrating it was to simply use the Web. Between shockingly obtrusive GDPR consent forms and outright blocks on Websites from EU consumers, it was a wild look at what Europeans have to go through under the guise of consumer protections.
Like, the pendulum swung WAY too far in the other direction.
Not under the guise. They are consumer protections. As a European, I like them very much.
It surfaces which websites use stronger tactics to track you, and which allow consumer friendly opt-outs. There are even many websites that don’t need the notices as they don’t use cookies for tracking a natural person (their cookies are not associated with personally identifiable information).
So we can choose what we use because we are informed.
It surfaces which websites use stronger tactics to track you, and which allow consumer friendly opt-outs.
The problem is I didn't see a single web site that I visited where this was apparent. It was a mess of opt-in pop-ups and settings and whatnot that completely overwhelmed me with actionable things I had to do before I could interact with a site, and often many companies clearly just said F it and blocked anyone from Europe.
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AFAIK many cookie consent banners are actually against the law. IIUC denying any non-essential cookies should always be as easy as accepting all cookies. This is something many cookie banners have not managed.
So to me this seems more like the tech-companies and websites being annoying at implementing an easy solution, in order to rebel against the laws and make people angry at it for the inconvenience, then the law itself being bad.
(https://measuredcollective.com/why-your-cookie-banner-is-pro...)
How about not allowing "1579 partners" to track every click on your website?
> Between shockingly obtrusive GDPR consent forms and outright blocks on Websites from EU consumers,
None of which are required by GDPR. In fact, those obtrusive "consent" forms are usually violations of GDPR.
As much as the idea of GDPR (and specifically cookie consent) is well intentioned, the actual laws themselves aren't great. Cookie consent is especially frustrating because it encourages the creators of the consent popups to use dark patterns to try and trick people into just accepting them.
Cookie consent only apply to non-necessary cookies.
The laws are great because every cookie consent form is essentially saying, "we as a company want you to accept a cookie that is unnecessary."
If you don't install unnecessary cookies, you don't need to have a consent form.
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> Between shockingly obtrusive GDPR consent forms
Imagine if companies didn't collect copious amounts of user data and didn't try to use every trick in the book and all known dark patterns to make you give up that data.
"We care about privacy by selling your data to 2765 'partners' and are blaming GDPR for this"