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Comment by AJRF | Hacker News Reader

I suspect replacement batteries are going to become very expensive in the EU. The laws that the EU try to bring in always sound so good in practice - but they are very surface level and the implementation never accounts for second order effects.

See; cookie banner laws, GDPR.

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A daily reminder that cookie popups have very little to do with GDPR and cookie laws. If a site doesn't track you (w/ 3rd parties) and uses its own session cookies to provide service, it'd need no banners.

Case in point - look at github.com - they did the right thing. Or look at apple.com... or even gs.com.

Lost faith in this whole idea of EU trying to force companies to do better after the cookie law.

Now every single website I have to dismiss a pop up before I visit. Yet once dismissed the site functions completely fine so really the law should have just made whatever happens when I click accept illegal because you clearly don’t need it for any of these services to function.

But no, now I have to dismiss a pop up every time instead.

As annoying as dismissing the popup is:

> Yet once dismissed the site functions completely fine

This is one of the intended outcomes of the law, because it prevents companies denying service to those who do not wish to be tracked on an all-or-nothing basis. Which is something that was beginning to happen.

It may seem like there was no outcome from the legislation, but this is partly because it outlaws some outcomes. It's like the Y2K thing, when people tell you that it was all a fuss over nothing.

What cookie law? The cookie banner was never mandated, except in cases where you're trying to set cookies which are not legitimately necessary for your business but are for surveillance purposes. The trouble is businesses either don't understand this or pretend not to.

My company doesn't understand it, and shows a banner because you never know. However, I've turned it into a simple thing that tells you we're not tracking you (it's only a session cookie, after all), and after clicking goes away for a year (plus a cookie to track consent, of course).

In fact, most of the problems stem from the fact, that the EU did not agree on a new cookie law (ePrivacy directive), which promised that you can set your preferences once (e.g. in the browser) and make sites agree to them. But no, lobbying was big and the law was delayed indefinitely.

GDPR was never(and never intended to be) a technical law, it is by name "general"! You get the same "notification" if you walk into a public space where security cameras are installed.

You're a free market defender, and you think battery prices go up when there's more demand?

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