GDPR causes friction when surfing the web. I have tried plugins to auto accept and manually setting checkboxes but the breath of sites I visit (and the devices I use) still keep bringing these notices to the top. I’ve had it!
Nope. The websites do this, but its inconsequential. Every single piece of literature you hear about how collecting data is bad fails to mention any real world results of this. And no, things like Cambridge Analytica do not count, unless you want to make the claim that people are so easily influenced by online media that they cannot be trusted with their free will and MUST be subjected to strictly controlled media consumption.
The real problem is that there was some idea planted in peoples heads that we should care about privacy. Even worse, a lot of people in the tech world adopted this, without understanding what privacy even is.
In reality, people dgaf about privacy. Of course, they say they do, because its feels good to virtue signal. But for every day things, everyone buys phones and uses apps that track you everywhere and build models, stores their personal data in the cloud, and pretty much always click accept on all the website banners, because when there is nobody around to virtue signal to about privacy, the reward is not there, but the drawback is degraded experience.
But of course anything ideologic like this can be used to win elections, and hence GDPR, which exists only as a means for politicians to gain political power through pretending to care about some aspect of peoples lives.
For the record, privacy = control of the data that you put out, which means you have to go pretty in depth tech wise to set this up if you want full privacy (for example, rooted Android phone with no google apps, removing or firewalling services that phone home). And its fine to accept some level of degraded privacy for a better user experience, but your standard shouldn't be the standard for everyone.
What's astonishing is how you visit some bog ordinary web site and they want to put 30 or 40 cookies on you. If it was one cookie or 3 or 4 cookies it would be one thing but it's completely out of hand.
They ought to pass a law that says you can opt out of all the cookies by pushing one button or you can pick the ones you want one by one because whenever you see that list it's astonishing... Though who knows, that might just reinforce monopoly because if sites had a limited number of 3rd party cookies to stick on they would be Google and Facebook.
Pro Tip: Did you know you can get rid of those stupid embed boxes from X on many sites by denying cookies?
> They ought to pass a law that says you can opt out of all the cookies by pushing one button
That is already what the law says. Opting out should be as simple as opting in. So if accepting all is one click, rejecting all should be too. Every website which does not do it is non-compliant.
Nah, if opting out was hard it would educate people about just how insane the situation is. I mean, why the hell do they need 30 cookies?
(Part of it I know is that everybody in the advertising ecosystem has their knives out because they expect that everybody else is going to cheat them. If they have 30 tracking cookies from 30 third parties, they can't all be in on the scam, can they?)
It hasn't. Surfing the web without an adblocker is almost as bad as 20 years ago without Firefox or Opera and popups galore. Less immediate, acute security risks than then, more videos on autoplay.
There's no need for a 'GDPR' notification for non-tracking cookies. It's not even about the cookie, it's about the tracking.
What's 'ruined the web' (for many) is concentration of sites into a handful of mega-'properties' that seek to own their visitors and users. To say this is GDPR-induced is to propagate and amplify the lie.
I'm not expecting sense in technical matters (or any other matters for that matter) from head-in-the-clouds bureaucrats.
The real blame should go to the browser makers and standards bodies. It's their job to save people from this idiocy or otherwise the politicians just screw things up for everybody. Figure out a way to get browsers to have a sane default on handling cookies at the browser level without having to fill in a stupid form on every single page.
GDPR has only exposed the absolute spying / tracking / collecting shitshow that's the current web. If a website [0] shows me a list of hundreds of data brokers to which they will sell my data, I will just close the tab.
The absurd irony of GDPR is that those who need to see these privacy warnings the least - those who block cookies and run ad blockers and privacy plugins - are faced with seeing them annoyingly and continually. On the contrary, those who accept tracking and perhaps need to continue to see the warnings the most have those messages magically disappear in perpetuity and are allowed to browse in peace. No positive impact whatsoever.
No. The GDPR doesn't mandate those obnoxious banners so it didn't ruin the web experience.
_Cookie_ banners were devised as a lazy way to comply with the ePrivacy Directive, which is about cookies among other things. Now, the same lazy minds that gave us those obnoxious banners are the same that shove unrelated GDPR stuff into them and in our collective throat.
No, it did not. Every time you place the blame on GDPR you reveal how much you’ve fallen into the hands of the ones who violate your data.
It’s as if companies had been adding lead to your milk for decades, then a law passed saying you could only do that with consent, and now you’re complaining that there are all these consent forms every time you want to drink your leaded milk instead of taking it as an indicator to buy from another brand.
Blaming the GDPR is absurd. Who you should blame are the companies who pry on your data and make it purposefully annoying to reject the data collection. Which, by the way, is not following the law because it stipulates rejecting should be as easy as accepting.
If anything, the GDPR should have been more aggressive and made all extraneous data collection outright illegal with no option to opt-in. As it stands, it’s still a powerful indicator of those you cannot trust, letting you know as soon as you open their website.
It should make all data collection illegal! Databases should be completely banned, there's no reason for them to exist. Postgres is more dangerous than a nuclear weapon. Redis needs to be shut down and all the employees arrested!
