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KMnO4

I hate that everyone benefits from GDPR and is rooting for Europe, yet very little is being done in North America.

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I hate that everyone benefits from GDPR and hates GDPR and Europe for daring to try.

Whereas I hate GDPR, because all it has accomplished is making it harder to browse the web.

Nothing else.

How did it make it harder to browse the web?

No, it has very much also accomplished the task of showing you in (literal) big bright banners which websites have complete disregard for your data. If a website goes to great lengths to trick you into giving away your data, that’s a fantastic sign you should leave and never come back.

No it doesn’t. It shows you which websites are big enough to be a target and/or to have entire regulatory compliance teams that are spooked by the threat of a revenue fine to invest enough resources into implementing a horribly bad UX just to dot their “i”s.

There’s nothing in the regulation that says the UX has to be bad; quite the contrary!¹ That’s the point: the harder a service goes out of their way to make the data collection UX bad—which is harder than making it simple—the less they care about you.

In addition, legitimate cookies to provide a service don’t require consent.²

If you’re annoyed at the EU instead of the websites, you’ve played right into the hands of the people wanting your data for illegitimate purposes. Every time you agree to a bad cookie banner you validate their shady practices and make the web worse for everyone, including yourself.

¹ https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-reject-buttons-come

² https://wikis.ec.europa.eu/display/WEBGUIDE/04.+Cookies+and+...

that's like saying the graphic warning on your cigarette packages makes it more difficult for you to enjoy smoking. You're barking up the wrong tree

Yes, because getting cancer from smoking is the same as having cookies in your browser. What a completely asinine argument, even if it seems to be very popular these days.

"Oh you are against x regulation? Yet you aren't against mandatory seatbelts or warnings in cigarette packages, or child labor laws! Curious!"

Like you realize that it is a pretty self defeating argument, since you are inadvertently saying that any regulation is a slippery slope to another one. Which thankfully isn't the case, and people can actually form an opinion on individual laws (and even disagree with them!) even if they are in favor of other regulations.

You gravely misunderstood the point of the analogy. The issue at hand isn't regulation, because nothing is being regulated, so there's no slippery slope. What cookie warnings and cancer warnings have in common is that they make transparent, to you the consumer, what a company or product is doing to you. You can still do it and opt into everything. It's no more regulatory than a nutritional table on a package of food.

People sometimes then have the weird reflex to blame regulators for making explicit what garbage they're being fed, when you should take it up with the company who is actually responsible for vacuuming up your data.

Well, this new specific detail of the law should get everything in order. Ignoring the banner means refusing for tracking. This was already in gdpr but not directly stated. So, in near future, banners should disappear in the current form

> Whereas I hate GDPR, because all it has accomplished is making it harder to browse the web. Nothing else.

Simply not accurate. The GDPR has other, more important accomplishments. See also: "gdpr unsubscribe", "gdpr do not contact", "gdpr consent". e.g. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

There are also other, less visible accomplishments. I've been on the inside of companies doing a GDPR data compliance check, and for some data stores, simply deciding that this one is not the "system of record", that passes beyond usefulness and setting a time-to-live of e.g. a month or a year, so that data about user actions is not retained beyond that.

This _absence_ of retained PII ( https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/ ) that has been encouraged by GDPR will inevitably make some breach somewhere less severe, but "what could have happened but did not" is not a visible accomplishment.

Thinking that it's all about your cookie banner is shallow, dismissive and egocentric.

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