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Comment by heavenlyblue | Hacker News Reader

What else did the EU do bad for you?

Make me click throughly thousands of useless cookie warnings.

You know what a cookie is, most non technical people, those whose idea of Internet overlaps with Facebook, do not.

You know, I used to get really aggravated at those. "This is silly!" I would rant. "Cookies are harmless!" But I've started to come around.

Yes, they're still irritating. But I like the fact that site owners have to THINK about how they're irritating their users and I'd like to think they're questioning whether or not they _really_ need to use cookies to serve static content...

I think they should rather press browser companies to expose privacy settings more and make management easier. So instead of having millions of popups, you could do it from the browser level. That would be more secure and easier to implement.

Or more likely, they search for and install "cookie warning plugin" in 2 minutes and then forget about it forever.

Websites don't need a cookie warning for harmless cookies (like login cookies or language preferences). Cookie warnings are only needed for tracking cookies, and those aren't exactly harmless.

I find this opinion amusing, given that at the same time US was successfully failing to keep the net neutrality.

It could have been a bad decision per se, but historically laws take years to become actually useful. And internet is only now getting out of the "Wild West" phase.

On that matter: how many of NH'ers here have voted for Brexit due to the cookie laws?

It is not only that, but also that enabled huge vulnerability, because people now click these without reading.

Cookie warnings are the new ads. My ad-blocker eats them.

The problem isn't the warnings. The problem is that every damn website where you read a single article thinks it's somehow ok to set a cookie (and track you).

The problem is both. We can't pretend that failed solutions with good intentions are not problems. It is not worth adding more problems on the stack because the guess-and-check solution whims fail. Solutions can be measured and worked towards, not guessed at where they do such large changes that their failure is also large.

Many aspects of GDPR seem as direct attempt to learn from the failures of the Cookie warning law and fix them - namely, the big flaw was that the law was written so that flashing a banner with no real choice was considered sufficient to consider that the user "agreed", and that's why everyone did the intrusive banners.

GDPR is designed so that these intrusive banners with no real choice are absolutely worthless to the site, they can't construe freely given informed opt-in consent, so the expectation is that websites won't bother with such measures anymore. Of course, time will show what workarounds people will imagine, but both intent and actual wording is wide enough to ensure that this time the adtech tracking business will have no reasonable legal way to get permission to continue what they did and will actually have to stop tracking most users.

That wasn't the EU's fault; that was purely and 1000% the fault of the websites that implemented them and chose to do a half-assed job of it.

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