this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
1032 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
60115 readers
2588 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A serious law would be like (but in legalese):
That is actually really close to what is present now. The EU never said "use cookie banners" but rather "if you really want to track people, they have to say yes". And most commercial websites decided to make it hard to say no, now everyone blames the EU for doing so. Your second point is not yet implemented, this would be really good for consumers.
They never should have made opt-in an option in the first place. All the legitimate reasons to store data are already permitted without asking permission (required for the site to function, or storing data the user specifically asked the site to store such as settings). All that's left is things no one would reasonably choose to consent to if they fully understood the question, so they should have just legislated that the answer is always "no". That plus a bit more skepticism about what sites really "need" to perform their function properly. (As that function is understood by the user—advertising is not a primary function of most sites, or desired by their users, so "needed for advertising to work" does not make a cookie "functional" in nature. Likewise for "we need this ad revenue to offer the site for free"; you could use that line to justify any kind of monetization of private user data.)
There is a fine and impossible to hit line that businesses have their own interest of surviving and should be able to use data. Like making better suggestions or tracking whether certain changes in their homepage work. This is not required for functioning but vital to companies for succeeding and giving you a better product. However, this should only be done on one site at a time, cross-site tracking oe fingerprinting is what sucks and allows data brokers to exist in the first place.
No lawyer can hammer into law, what a site needs to function, as it differs by site and is flexible in what people think is necessary. But your examples are good in that they show how sites go way too far to justify their over-the-top tracking. Maybe there really is an easy way to write it in "legalese", but I don't see it yet. But I am fully on your site, the current behaviour and practices are bad and unclear for customers.
Seriously I hate how disabling cookies is a hassle that you have to do on a seperate settings site... Where you get another cookie banner obstructing half of the settings
Sounds like the current law, except for the last point. The problem is with enforcing compliance.