EDIT: I didn’t realize the anger this would bring out of people. It was supposed to be a funny meme based on recent real-life situations I’ve encountered, not an attack on the EU.

I appreciate the effort of the EU cookie laws. The practice of them just doesn’t live up to the theory of the law. Shady companies are always going to find a way to be shady.

    • purplemonkeymad@programming.dev
      10·
      1 year ago

      IIRC the EU also ruled that burying the rejection options under additional links counts as a violation. Hence why Google now has a Reject button next to the accept button. Most sites still do that.

    • Sysosmaster@infosec.pub
      4·
      1 year ago

      even worse offenders are the ones with tick boxes for “Legitimate Interest”, since legitimate interest is another grounds for processing (just ads freely given consent is one), the fact you got a “tick” box for it makes it NOT legitimate interest within the confines of the GDPR.

      it also doesn’t matter what technology you use whether its cookies / urls / images / local storage / spy satellites. its solely about how you use the data…

    • Steeve@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      But what are they going to do about it?

      “Here’s a fine, if you don’t pay it your site can no longer operate in the EU”

      “… ok”

      • Knusper@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        The EU is an important market for many websites, so yeah, that is usually what happens.

  • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de
    2·
    1 year ago

    Nearly all of these are illegal, but sadly there is little enforcement when it comes to this. (Tracking must be opt-in, not opt-out. Ignoring a banner must be interpreted as declining. Opting out must be a simple option, not navigating a complex and misleading menus. The users choice applies to any form of tracking, not just cookies…)

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, it is great here.

        Either the website is great and doesn’t ask anything.

        Or it asks for cookie consent, which you can decline in 1 click.

        Or it pulls one of those “break the website” tricks which will get them sued sooner or later.

        Or they block access to EU members, at which point you know they only exist to extract your data anyway.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’m pretty sure breaking your website with no cookies is against the rules, actually. It’s either serve the EU with GDPR-compliance or GTFO entirely.

    Yeah, you could still just break the law, but as usual there’s a cost to that one way or the other.

    • Vuraniute@thelemmy.club
      2·
      1 year ago

      this. and honestly I wish more websites followed the “serve under gdpr or don’t have a European marker”. A random blog once wasn’t available in the EU because of GDPR. And you know what? It’s better than them violating GDPR and the EU doing nothing.

    • Big P@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Tons of companies break the cookie law already, but enforcement seems to be rare

  • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    1 year ago
    1. This was not about cookies, but processing of personal data and new definitions of such data. Cookies was just an example.
    2. By those laws, forcing user to consent with denying access to the service is declared illegal.
  • Scoopta@programming.dev
    1·
    1 year ago

    I refuse to go to sites that do this, I also refuse to go to sites that block adblock…and specially the sites that detect and block private browsing, that one shouldn’t even be a thing

    • Zikeji@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Sites that block adblock - I have network based filtering I’m not going to take the time to specifically figure out what ad providers you’re using (which is probably that same as everyone else) just to unblock your shitty site.

        • WaLLy3K@infosec.pubEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Hilariously, I find the Pi-hole feature “disable for 5 seconds” often works because it’ll be down for long enough to load the page but not the ads.

  • genoxidedev1@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    That’s gotta be quite some website you visited, if it didn’t load at all without cookies. As someone from Germany, who mostly rejects every sites cookies, except for the essential ones most of the time, but sometimes outright rejects all cookies, I’ve never encountered a website that refused to load upon doing that.

    Not defending any webpages that do do that, just contributing my personal experience.

    Also: this for chrome or this for fiefrerfx

  • RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Road to hell, good intentions and all that. Government fundamentally misunderstanding the role of cookies and the fact that browsers can handle user privacy with trivial effort by default rather than having every single website annoy the fuck out of you with a million goddamn notifications before actually showing you what you want to see.

    • kornel@programming.dev
      1·
      1 year ago

      The annoying popups are an act of malicious compliance from data harvesting companies. The tracking industry wants people to associate the right to privacy with stupid annoyance, so that people will stop demanding privacy.

      The legislation does not say anything about cookies. It’s about rights and responsibilities in data collection (no matter how it’s done technically). The “consent” part of it exists as a compromise, because there has been heavy lobbying against the legislation.

      This is not a technical problem — we’ve had many technologies for it, and the industry has sabotaged all of them. There was the P3P spec in 2002! It has been implemented in IE that had 90%+ market share back then. And Google has been actively exploiting a loophole in IE’s implementation to bypass it and have unlimited tracking. Google has paid fines for actively subverting Safari’s early anti-tracking measures. Then browsers tried DNT spec as the simplest possible opt-out, and even that has been totally rejected by the data harvesting industry. There are easy technical solutions, but there are also literally trillions of dollars at stake, and ad companies will viciously sabotage all of it.