[jariel]

"No, the legislators didn't want the pop-ups to be annoying. They didn't even require pop-ups."

This is the point: the legislators were exceedingly naive, and created a bad outcome.

'National Geographic' is not evil, they are struggling and most of these sites are not giant entities with well-staffed experts.

It's a good example of poorly designed legislation.

"This is part of their game, make the experience miserable to people start getting angry at politicians."

This is completely false and conspiratorial, almost disturbingly so.

These are normal companies, with normal people, pragmatic policies.

The legislation has unconditionally failed at least in this specific way - all we have now are constant popups. That's the reality of the change.

[piva00]

The spirit of the law dictates that:

- The default option of consent is opt-out.

- Opt-in and opt-out should be equally easy and accessible.

Tell me how a company who would be trying to be ethical and follow this spirit would come up with the current pop-ups.

Don't blame the legislation for allowing dark patterns to be used due to loopholes or failure of prediction all possible clever tricks to circumvent the spirit described above.

It hasn't unconditionally failed, the pop-ups are still there and I opt-out of every single one of them.

Except one: schneidersladen.de - they follow exactly the spirit of the law, I put the bar there.

[dkersten]

> 'National Geographic' is not evil, they are struggling and most of these sites are not giant entities with well-staffed experts.

There's a very simple solution: respect my privacy and don't store or sell data about me. If you only use cookies necessary for running the site, then you don't need to do anything.

If you must track me, then do as sibling commenter said. If you store privacy-invading data about me, then you damn well better know the laws and if you don't, then sorry, you can't track me on your website.

[jariel]

This position is a somewhat naive because it does not following through with the consequences of the actions: you missed the part where there is no National Geographic - and you don't get any content - in the most ideal scenarios from the user's perspective.

The business model of the internet is advertising, as of today, that requires cookies, which by the way, don't represent material harm.

Also - you're specific view is in no way representative of the population at large. 'Most people' would rather remain completely private at the same time, they would forgo at least some degree of privacy for the option.

Given the choice of a:

a) No content b) Constant popups c) The previous imperfect norm but where people can get their content without hassle ...

They would chose option 'c' - hands down.

The effect of legislation is to create popup hassles for individuals that they never read - and to provide no real material improvement for people.

What they could have don instead.

i) Orchestrated cookie-free advertising exchanges and solutions

ii) Created privacy 'categories' and relevant rules and symbols, like movie ratings - and a symbol could be placed o prominently on the site so consumers have a quick and easy mechanism to know where they stand.

iii) worked with other nations and groups to arrive at consistent standards. With Canada, Australia, Japan on board, it might be very well possible to convince a Biden-lend USA to buy into some kind of standard.

What we have now is not pragmatic and it's ill conceived.

This would all go away if users were will to fork over 5 cents to read an article.