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.
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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.
Do you know if there is a EU-wide place to report such behavior?
The biggest privately owned TV channel in my country not only does that, but actually just redirects you to a pdf file if you want to “manage cookies”. And it’s not like I can submit a complaint on a national level, as the ruling party’s website uses google analytics without a cookie notice at all.
I think you report to your nation’s Data Protection Centre, each member has their own that takes the reports. If I was still in the EU I would have put more time into finding out how reports work.
https://dataprivacymanager.net/list-of-eu-data-protection-supervisory-authorities-gdpr/
Here you can find the GDPR authority per EU country.
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I mean almost all websites fall foul of that. You often have to bury deep and end up with a palette of complicated choices and acceptances of individual tracking companies. It’s a bloody mess. The EU should just have mandated “do not track” adherence. There’s already a standard; just enforce it.
Most sites definitely don’t do this
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Yeah this is very common, I don’t know why other people on here are gaslighting like it doesn’t happen. It’s this way for major sites like YouTube/Twitter/Twitch/etc too. Hell even embedding a YouTube video on a site is violating GDPR. It’s a good idea, but needs a version 2.0 patch to fix some exploits.
There is also a name for these kind of psychological tricks and pressure. It’s called nudging.
I found a small report on this by the EU Commission’s science and knowledge service. https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC127856/JRC127856_01.pdf
There are surely even better resources.
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…
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”
The EU is an important market for many websites, so yeah, that is usually what happens.
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…)
Any website that does that I just close the tab.
You should travel to Europe sometime and try to use the web
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.
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.
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.
Tons of companies break the cookie law already, but enforcement seems to be rare
What’s the cookie law?
If websites want to track you through cookies, they have to ask for permission.
- This was not about cookies, but processing of personal data and new definitions of such data. Cookies was just an example.
- By those laws, forcing user to consent with denying access to the service is declared illegal.
Cool. One less website to visit. Not like there is a shortage.
I love when the trash takes itself out
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
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.
LOL, I also use DNS based filtering soooo I feel your pain.
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.
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
some other just block access from the eu completely. (not a news site, but applebee’s does this)
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.
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.
That’s literally the point though…
Shrewd businessmen: 1
tyrannical big government: 0
