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Comment by denton-scratch | Hacker News Reader

> what a nightmare internet is in Europe

I live in Europe; I don't experience this "nightmare". Would you care to expand?

Sure. The nightmare is that every single time you open the browser on a website you have to go through the data tracking preference for that website. It's a lot of work to avoid being tracked (companies are obviously using dark patterns there) and when you do it 20 times a day it gets frustrating quickly and collectively a big waste of human time.

Now I am not saying the US doesn't have a problem. They just don't have GDPR and most website don't ask you for any permission to track you. So the experience is generally smoother (with the occasional tracking popup).

Ideally there should be a way for me to broadcast my willingness to share my data and not allow dark patterns to try to change my opinion. But the GDPR does not cover that and allows websites to drive you crazy until you click "YES, Track me"

I think your problem is that you're accessing US websites from Europe, since those are what you know. European websites are a lot less annoying, they actually care about the customer base here.

> every single time you open the browser on a website you have to go through the data tracking preference for that website

This is not my experience. Perhaps the websites you favour are exceptionally abusive.

> a way for me to broadcast my willingness to share my data

That's the opposite of what most people want to broadcast.

> But the GDPR does not cover that and allows websites to drive you crazy

Apparently your view is that GDPR should not allow that, i.e. it isn't strict enough. I'm inclined to agree.

If you are using a browser provided by an ad company surely being nagged to death to provide data they can sell is the expected outcome? You could use Firefox, which can disable most cookie banners [0].

[0] https://community.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/firefox-cookie-ba...

You mean we can use the development version of Firefox, which gets almost daily updates and also breaks things a lot of times. An important caveat.

No, I don't mean that.

The post is dated 2022. The feature became generally available in v120. Stable is v123, so it is available now. It's gated, so you still have to enable it as described in the post.

As someone who's lived in both the US and Europe during the past few years... GP is full of shit.

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