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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

> Millions of Americans rely on Europe's tough new privacy rules

...do they? I'm an American, and I sure wish the GDPR would crawl back from whence it came. The only thing it does for me is show me gratuitous popup messages that I have to mindlessly click through.

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Well, Americans who are EU residents like myself appreciate it greatly.

And you usually can get by those popups with reader mode - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...

I appreciate the European Collective Bargaining against corporations

To be fair, there are hundreds of millions of Americans, so that statement may be literally true.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. This is a fair comment.

GDPR is not just cookie banners. It's about putting the users in control of their data. It empowers you more than ever to find out what kind of data is collected about you, how/why it is used and with whom it gets shared.

I un-downvoted the comment but millions do appreciate that at least somebody is trying to do the right thing.

I think there’s some truth on both sides. The cookie warnings are definitely annoying.

The new warnings the GDPR came with are much better. Now you can actually say no.

Hahaha yeah right. If you can navigate the dark patterns to find the links to the opt outs from tracking then click through to 100 other websites and find their own opt outs (if they exist). Then trust them that they’re actually going to comply, won’t accidentally lose your settings etc.

Browser extensions to block them in the first place are still much more effective.

That's a violation of GDPR. They need to be opt-in to be legal, not opt-out.

Ok that's great - what does that mean? How do I make them make it an opt in?

I contacted ICO in the UK about a breach (amazon sending unsolicited marketing emails through the order update system) - ICO told me to talk to Amazon, who said "Oh we're sorry" and ignored me. Just because it's against the law, doesn't mean companies wo'nt do it.

You have to complain to the organisation first, before a supervisory authority will take action.

You can also appeal any decision of the ICO to the Information Tribunal if you're unsatisfied.

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