[Beldin]

From the article:

> As a result of increasingly strict privacy laws across the world, users are now beset with cookie banners across the Web

In the words of a law prof from the Radboud University, more accurate is to say "as a result of an entire industry colluding to undermine legislation".

[diggan]

Seems like more companies than needed are confessing to misusing people's data. If you only use cookies for login or other essential information (not related to tracking people), you do not need to show any cookie banner. Same with the GDPR stuff, if you don't store more data about users than absolutely needed for essential functionality, GDPR isn't affecting you.

[thayne]

>if you don't store more data about users than absolutely needed for essential functionality, GDPR isn't affecting you.

Except you need to completely delete all data for users who close their account. Need to have a data protection officer, and need to have a way to give users all the data you have from them upon request. All of which can be a significant burden for small companies, or non-commercial websites.

[diggan]

> Except you need to completely delete all data for users who close their account. Need to have a data protection officer, and need to have a way to give users all the data you have from them upon request. All of which can be a significant burden for small companies, or non-commercial websites.

Well, you're a good example about people misunderstanding GDPR :)

If you're a small company and processing data isn't a core part of your business and whatever the business does doesn't create risks for your users, there are parts of GDPR you don't have to care about, for example you don't need to have a DPO in that case.

GDPR is meant to protect users from businesses that are harvesting users data, in order to gain a bit of privacy back. It's not for your tiny SaaS that only requires a email to use and you collect no analytics about users.

[unmole]

> as a result of an entire industry colluding to undermine legislation

Asking for a friend: Is the the European Parliament also a part of the industry colluding to undermine legislation?

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/

[wkat4242]

The EP were just dumb. They let themselves be swayed by industry lobbyists to weaken the regulation and allow the cookiewalls. Now the EU gets blamed for this mess.

What they should have done is raise the "Do Not Track" flag to legal status. If the flag is enabled it must be obeyed without any further questions to the end-users. Making it mandatory would have solved the problem with this flag which was that everyone simply ignored it and it only added an extra bit of entropy for fingerprinting.

If this flag had become mandatory, the browsers that have removed it would have brought it back immediately because it actually would have become functional. Also, the onus would have been on the advertisers to stop friction for those who don't mind to be tracked. Instead of tricking people with cookiewalls the focus would have been on making the "tracked" experience as frictionless as the flag itself is.

But I guess the industry lobbied very heavily for this flag not to become mandatory because it would have instantly cut their tracking to near-zero and therefore remove the raison d'etre of many of these adtech businesses. It would have shocked the industry more than Apple's ID thing did to facebook. No big deal though IMO because this industry is undesirable and it would have triggered some real innovation in context-driven ads that are not privacy invasive.

It would have been the only good option though for the citizens. What the EU has done has only backfired on itself with everyone including the lobbyists blaming them for the cookiewall mess.

[skrebbel]

No but some agency they hired for their website it.