[idle_zealot]

The cookie prompt is a perfect example of under regulation. The law you're citing as over-regulation requires companies to get consent before tracking you. Companies across the board settled on "annoy users into consenting" as their compliance strategy. You want to revert to implied consent? Fuck that, layer on "also you can't pester users into agreeing to being tracked." Too vague? That's the point; anything else and you incentivize dancing on the line of exactly how close to non-compliance you can get away with. Politicians broadly shouldn't be product designers, but establishing broad no-go zones around anti-consumer behavior is foundational to modern society. Without that you get cartoon ads marketing menthol cigarettes to kids and commercials for casino apps for betting on drone strikes.

[ceejayoz]

Yup. It was pure malicious compliance by the tracking industry with the hopes of killing the regulation.

[aurareturn]

This is over regulation because regulation always have unintended consequences. The unintended consequence is the cookie prompt.

And before someone comes out saying that only "bad" websites want to track you, the official European Union website has a cookie prompt. https://commission.europa.eu/index_en

[idle_zealot]

> regulation always have unintended consequences

An extremely strong claim. You're making a generalized argument against any attempt to influence market forces. I can maintain the position that regulations can sometimes succeed and sometimes fail to achieve their goals, whereas you have to prove that, say, banning mining companies from hiring child coal miners has caused more harm than good in the form of unintended consequences.

[aurareturn]

I do not advocate for no laws at all.

[croon]

The page you linked has an "Accept all" and an "Accept necessary" button, and it's instant when you click the "necessary" button, or have it scripted. They opt-in for collecting third party data for analytics.

If they hadn't, or self-hosted analytics they wouldn't need the prompt at all.

Any site that is slower/more hidden to opt out is non-compliant, and is not an example of over regulation but under enforcement.

[dgellow]

It’s about consent, that has nothing to do with good or bad

[aurareturn]

99.999% of people don't care and don't even know what it's suppose to do. Yet, the cookie prompt has collectively wasted how many millions or billions of hours of people's time? How many freaking times has a website fully loaded, shows you a cookie prompt, and clicking on the wrong option will reload the entire website?

The web has gotten worse since cookie prompts and websites lost a bit of competitiveness to mobile apps because of these annoying prompts. Load a website on a phone screen and 30% of the screen is covered by an intrusive cookie prompt.

As an industry, we learned a long time ago that people hate popups. European Union decided to make a law that causes most websites to show a popup or face potentially bankruptcy level of financial punishment.

[dgellow]

Yes, those cookie banners are annoying, I’m not sure what you want me to say. Companies can decide other approaches to track you with your consent, most decided to go with the frustrating UX. Having an annoying banner and explicit tracking consent is still an improvement over just collecting and sharing your data with 3rd parties without your knowledge and consent

[idle_zealot]

Or they could not collect unnecessary user data. They chose to waste users' time. If you don't like that we can always punish them for those billions of wasted hours.

[aurareturn]

Collecting user usage data is the basic step to actually understanding how your users use your website so you can improve it. It's so standard that even the official EU government website collects this kind of data and has a cookie prompt.

And you know what irks me the most? These politicians weren't smart enough to write a law that does this to all digital places. Yes, they only wrote this law for websites while apps are basically free to collect the same data on users freely without any prompting.

[dgellow]

> And you know what irks me the most? These politicians weren't smart enough to write a law that does this to all digital places. Yes, they only wrote this law for websites while apps are basically free to collect the same data on users freely without any prompting.

That’s wrong, you can check the EDPB guidelines[0], consent is required for mobile apps, desktop programs, SDKs, etc

The collection isn’t the issue. As long as it is done with consent. Which is why the EU website is showing you the banner. You also do not need to prompt if you do not share with 3rd parties and for what is considered essential for your services to function

0: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/our-documents/guid...

[ceejayoz]

> Collecting user usage data is the basic step to actually understanding how your users use your website so you can improve it.

Sure. To a point!

But then you go to, say, the Daily Mail, and its cookie banner tells you they'd like to share with their 1,300 ad/tracking partners, and that you can turn them off only individually.

[croon]

> Collecting user usage data is the basic step to actually understanding how your users use your website so you can improve it.

You can do that without a cookie prompt if you don't send it off to a third-party.

I rather like knowing which companies do and don't.