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Comment by brennebeck | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat tangential: have you seen GitLab’s notice? And what’s your opinion of that style, as far as informing/consent?

GitLab seems to use the Cookiebot solution. I like that "Marketing" cookies are disabled by default, although they should be labeled as "Advertising". Also, even if you bother to read the purposes of all the 80 advertising cookies, the descriptions are incomplete and dishonest. For example:

Doubleclick cookie notice: "Used by Google DoubleClick to register and report the website user's actions after viewing or clicking one of the advertiser's ads with the purpose of measuring the efficacy of an ad and to present targeted ads to the user."

Facebook cookie notice: "Used by Facebook to deliver a series of advertisement products such as real time bidding from third party advertisers."

These descriptions fail to mention that the collected data will be combined with information from thousands of other websites you visit which allows to create sophisticated user profiles. From these profiles, you can infer things like gender, age, socio-economic status, interests, or hobbies with relatively high accuracy. Even if you asked them, Google and Facebook couldn't tell which hidden categories their machine learning models can discover.

At GitLab we really care about transparency and it's one of our core values. Here you can find out more about Cookies policy https://docs.gitlab.com/cookies-policy/

I agree with what you’re saying; you’re proposing some ideal changes. But I think given where we were as a community or what has become the norm in tracking/social, this is a great step and is a big improvement over the past. It looks like someone from GitLab replied in a sibling to my comment, so maybe giving this extra feedback will bring about further changes.

Edit: and yes, I just checked and it looks like Cookiebot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com