Comment by dgb23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgb23 | Hacker News Reader

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The actually ridiculous part is not that.

It’s the fact that our browsers don’t solve this issue in a standardized way.

Everyone who serves HTTP in the Eu and includes third party tracking, shows you an idiosyncratic consent banner. Often these things download a large amount of JS as well.

That’s completely and utterly idiotic.

- It’s confusing for users.

- It interrupts the user’s flow everytime they visit a site.

- It’s bad for overall performance.

- It’s bad for people who publish content.

- Developers have to defer to legal experts for trivial stuff out of FUD.

- It doesn’t work correctly on the technical side.

- It doesn’t work from a user’s perspective, because they just get annoyed or uncertain and falsely consent!

Nobody wins.

It should just be a standard, global feature in browsers. A site should only ask you _once_, if at all from a user’s perspective.

The browser should send a “profiling and tracking” whitelist, or simply make it available via a JS API.

Why is this not the case?

> Everyone who serves HTTP in the Eu and includes third party tracking, shows you an idiosyncratic consent banner. Often these things download a large amount of JS as well.

> That’s completely and utterly idiotic.

Yes. And that's not the fault of the law, but the fault of the companies.

1. The law doesn't talk about browsers, or cookies, or banners. It's a General Data Protection Regulation. It applies in equal measure to browsers, apps, VR, AR, offline interactions, and whatever you can think of

2. The law is ridicuously simple for 99% of use cases, and is extremely cheap to implement. It says, "Only use data you need for the operation of your business. If you collect any other data, you have to ask users for consent. Consent has to be informed, and it must be as easy to say no as it is to say yes"

> Why is this not the case?

Because the companies think that tracking you and selling your data on theopen market is their god-given right.

And the standard is literally already there: it's called GDPR.

As a very much devils advocate, one could argue that some companies make a revenue steam or of serving ads, so taking steps to do that is their legitimate business. I personally think that's a screwed up business model but there you are. I've always found legitimate business to be annoyingly vague.

Legitimate interest is defined by GDPR.

"I can make money by collecting this data" is not a legitimate interest.

It does not seem that argument will fly: https://edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2022/tiktok-italia...

You can still serve ads without tracking, collecting enormous amounts of data etc.

"Legitimate interest" is there to cover areas that are too numerous to cover in a law. E.g. combating fraud is a legitimate activity, and it requires more data than you strictly need to operate your business.

However, as with all things, companies will try and exploit any and all loopholes possible.

I’m not attacking the law. I’m attacking the implementation and the lack of Web standards to accommodate user privacy.

They had such a standard called Do Not Track. It was used by the ad industry to track users. So Do Not Track was removed.

So why would companies who don't give two shits about user privacy bother with any implementation or standards? The law already tells them to provide a yes/no option, and yet here we are.

There's already DNT(Do not track) in the browsers, but nobody respects it.

So there’s the problem. This should be sufficient?

Browsers removed the Do Not Track header because it was... used to track users.

This should give you the answer to "why this isn't sufficient". The ads industry does not respect anything until it's driven out of existence by fines.

exactly

and top is complaining that his industry was instead given unholy ammounts of money to agrue that it isn't.

So would a law that makes illegal to respect it + actual enforcement of said law be the missing approach here?

> Why is this not the case?

It's an EU law what did you expect?

>Nobody wins.

You just described regulations.

Without regulations I'd need to grow my own food, though.

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