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by adhesive_wombat 1563 days ago
Or, blame companies for throwing passive-aggressive shitfits that aim to mislead people. GDPR doesn't mean you have to have an intrusive confusing mess of a cookie banner, for example.

In fact, a confusing banner that makes you play a minigame to get the respect for your personal information that you have a legal right to (in the EU) is explicitly disallowed.

And if you don't want any banners, then don't collect any information you don't have to. If it's actually technically needed, you don't need consent. For example, Wikipedia has lots of cookies for things like UI elements and they don't need a banner.

2 comments

> In fact, a confusing banner that makes you play a minigame to get the respect for your personal information that you have a legal right to (in the EU) is explicitly disallowed.

It is. So are the ones defaulting to "yes". And the ones where there is just a popup telling the user to install some blocker in their browser without giving them a choice (like https://npr.org ). Or telling them to take a subscription if they don't want to be tracked.

All these things are illegal but unfortunately they are not enforced.

That’s not really comforting to me as an end user forced to deal with punch the monkey cookie banners everywhere.
Indeed, having it repeatedly demonstrated that companies are willing to unapologetically break laws to attempt to trick me into permitting them to scrape up my personal data is not very comforting.
So maybe the government shouldn’t pass a law that it can’t or won’t enforce? See also “The War on $x” or “because terrorism”, “think of the children”.
CNIL, the French regulator, did just (last month) fine Google and Facebook 150 and 60 million euros, so there is some level of enforcement, but I agree it's not enough.

There are some big ones here: https://www.tessian.com/blog/biggest-gdpr-fines-2020. Ironically, that site also has a cookie banner that attempts to trick you into thinking that the highlighted button will save the default preferences shown (it won't, it'll turn them all in, then save that). This is illegal too.