[aphantastic]

There’s an open question of who is to blame when poorly written legislation causes companies (with fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders) find ways to follow the letter of the law but not the intent and create end results that are worse for the public.

The American perspective tends to be that if millions of users are suffering because thousands of companies are interpreting the laws created by a single legislature, we should tell that one legislature to fix their shit. (Note: not that they actually do fix their shit, but that’s who we yell at)

The European perspective tends to be that the thousands of companies should each be individually yelled at to fix their shit (Note: not that they actually do fix their shit, but that’s who they yell at)

Neither way is all that effective tbh. But looking at the end results, I must say I prefer using the internet outside of the EU. I always use private browsing, and the implementation of EU rules when browsing the web in Europe makes this an absolutely insufferable experience. Pages and pages of legalese I have to click through to access a single google result - when guess what, none of that applies because I’m browsing in private. The natural response for me would be to then disable private browsing and let google store its “you clicked through our bullshit” cookie to make my life easier — resulting in the exact opposite of the intended effect of the law.

Like I said, neither side is perfect, but using the internet “privately” is actually much easier outside of the EU vs in it. To me, that means we need to yell at the legislature. Opinions may very.

[Symbiote]

I have forgotten the recent example, but there are sites that don't have a banner at all because they don't track users and others that see the Do-Not-Track header and replace the banner with a discreet acknowledgement.

[aphantastic]

Good point, a reasonable response to the who debacle would be to get the legislature to mandate that a HTTP headset similar to do-not-track must be configurable on a browser basis and all requests that hold it must be seamlessly executed as if the user had pressed the “do not agree” button previously.