[kodablah]

This is how unintended consequences happen. Complaining how rational actors work around roadblocks has no practical effect. Who someone blames has no practical effect. The downside of looking at the intent of the law and assigning blame towards the market is that it encourages doubling down on these negative actions. Why not make popups illegal, they'll say. Why not make it illegal for you to optionally trade your data/tracking for services, they'll say. We need to keep fighting the market's misapplication of our original intent with more codified words, they'll say.

Pragmatic realizations of cause and effect are required instead of blame.

[jacquesm]

> Complaining how rational actors work around roadblocks has no practical effect.

I'm not sure I agree with the 'rational'. If you are so short-sighted as a company that your main course of action boils down to 'piss off the user' while doing everything you can to skirt the law then you deserve to suffer the longer term consequences. Rationality should operate on all time-frames simultaneously.

[kodablah]

I very much wish incentives were aligned this way. However, as the ad tech sector has shown, consumer apathy is pervasive enough that you can push the envelope quite hard against them before the costs near the benefits. Couple that with the uncertainty of an ever-changing tech landscape (especially considering impending government interference), and optimizing for short term profits is "rational". That's "rational" about money only, morality and sustainability be damned.

[jacquesm]

Hence the GDPR, which sort of makes this go full circle. These 'rational actors' are now trying with all their might to do an end-run around the law. It is interesting to see which companies 'get it' and which really don't get it. I suspect - and hope - that five years from now or so the ones that didn't get it will either have changed tack or will no longer be around.

[kodablah]

Although they are doing an end-run around the law, I'm not sure they are trying that hard. I suspect the law will become largely ignored (or massively paid lip service just to avoid being the tiniest rare case that is punished), and hope that alternative tech overcomes the entrenched.

[vsl]

Everybody has to do it, so not pissing your users is not an advantage. The other options for them are: block EU visitors (that pisses me even more) or go out of business (because they need the tracking to make at least some ad money from the freeloaders who want to read their content but won’t pay a dime).

Saying “just don’t track” is magical thinking. They ARE rational in doing the minimally revenue harming thing to comply in their less lucrative market.

The only ones suffering any consequences are people like us who have to click through so much crap to read something because of the bloody GDPR we didn’t ask for. (Like we didn’t ask for Netflix to have 30% of crappy EU content. That’s EU’s next disaster in making.)

[13years]

There is also the aspect that apparently there are plenty of people who are completely happy with exchanging data for free services.

For example:

"No Cash Needed At This Cafe. Students Pay The Tab With Their Personal Data" https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/29/643386327/no...

[howard941]

The students can't buy coffee from that joint even if they want to: Their money's no good, they only take data. Wow.

[Tsubasachan]

Risky. If you ever run for political office the media will find out how much alcohol you REALLY drank at university.

[crdoconnor]

>This is how unintended consequences happen. Complaining how rational actors work around roadblocks has no practical effect. Who someone blames has no practical effect. The downside of looking at the intent of the law and assigning blame towards the market is that it encourages doubling down on these negative actions.

Bounce rates must be through the roof, especially for clickbait. I'm certain that the market has noticed and will respond to this. I strongly doubt that this persistently annoying popup situation will stick around forever.

Ultimately I'm sure some kind of technological solution will emerge - e.g. you set what level of tracking you're happy with on your browser and your browser will fill in the popups for you and report back what the website is doing.

[__m]

This would only work for automatic opt-in. why would companies, that monetize your privacy stop bugging you unless you close that pop-up manually? I imagine there are a lot of people that use their browser with default settings, so there is a chance they don’t actually care about privacy