Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I feel like GDPR and such had some good spirit to it... but the result isn't what they had in mind and the consumers just click through everything / have no more clue. Piling on or malforming GDPR seems like it would just make the already unworkable situation more of a mess.

I like the "ideas" behind GDPR, it's just this isn't the way to do it and really accomplish anything that really helps an individual.

View on HN

I wonder how often we'll repeat the error of treating user privacy as something the user cares deeply about (against all this observable evidence to the contrary) before we accept that the well-demonstrated-and-documented default is users do not care (and if we want the behavior of websites to change, step 1 is educating users as to why they should care and what the risk models are).

Yeah I fear that is the case.

Unless users really become educated and then care ... this is all for not.

If it ever happens (people caring and informed) maybe we're a generation or two away from it being a thing. :(

I mean, for the average person, it's pretty rational not to care. The only result they see from tracking is seeing more relevant ads. 99.99% of people for the foreseeable future will not have a bad experience from commercial tracking (that they wouldn't have from non-tracked ads anyway).

It kind of feels like Prop 65 here in California. So many things have a 'this could cause cancer' tag that it is ignored 100% of the time, the exact opposite of its intent.

Amusingly I actually just added a ton of Prop 65 warnings to a ton of things because someone got tired of thinking about if it should be applied to every third thing. So now it is on everything ....

That was kinda vauge as I don't want to get into specifics as it is job related, but man it was timely ;)

Don't forget to apply a sticker to the roll of stickers themselves. You never really know what's in that adhesive, after all...

I in fact added to warning to a comment in the code, and the commit, and so on ;)

The reason it hasn't been super successful is that there haven't been big punishments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com