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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

the regulation is a joke anyway, so why pretend? same with gdpr and the so called online privacy. it’s all smoke and mirrors with an added serving of mixed anti-americanism and european protectionism. they should remove everything from the books until these things have heft. and if they can’t come up with something serious, why legislate in the first place? just for populism’s sake? (eg UK’s online safety bill)

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What you call a joke does work albeit slowly. Most of pages have a 'reject all' button now. It didn't get there in the first iteration, but the effect is nice now. As a bonus, you quickly see who works in bad faith, by how it's implemented.

Sadly the reject all became widespread as companies switched over to negating it by hiding "legitimate interest" toggles in multiple sublevels of expandables.

That used to work when it was just the cookie law, it doesn't work any longer. It must be "as easy" to opt in as it is to opt out, because of this dark pattern specifically.

Sure, there's the rules as written, and there's the actual behaviour of companies, and I think it's clear there's still a need for fines (and more of them) until companies start to comply and stop coming up with wishful workarounds to opt users in by default and then complain the law is unclear when they get smacked for an action that was clearly against the spirit of the law.

It's a joke because it demonizes a specific technology which is only tangentially related to the goal. Imagine if we wanted to make drive-by shootings illegal and rather than passing a murder law your politicians criminalized having windows in cars.

Cookies are the least offensive tracking technology. They're visible to users and the interactions with them can be seen. The EU should have mandated that all tracking has to be implemented as a cookie so that users could see it and block it themselves. Instead they added a lot of cruft and legal risk to every website and it doesn't make anyone "safer".

> you quickly see who works in bad faith

No, and that's the ultimate fail. You click the button and feel safe but you can't see the server-side logs so it's entirely a false sense of security.

If you want to stop tracking, make the law about tracking not about the current methods.

The law is about tracking, in fact it's about data protection which is a step removed from tracking, tracking is just a principal route to PII acquisition.

The acquisition needs to be through informed consent and the data retention needs to be for the reasons consented to and not extend for periods beyond that (unless you need to keep data to comply with other laws, eg tax).

What is heft in this context?

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