←back to thread

Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

(legiscope.com)
332 points vegasbrianc | 3 comments | 14 Nov 24 22:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.623s | source
Show context
ryandrake ◴[14 Nov 24 22:58 UTC] No.42142148[source]▶
People blame the cookie banners themselves or the legislation that "made them necessary" but somehow never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites that make them subject to the law.

The "cookie banner problem" exists because it's primarily end users that are shouldering the burden of them, and not the companies. For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software engineer to code up a banner. For everyone else, it's thousands of wasted seconds per year. Make the law hit companies where it hurts: their balance sheets.

replies(11): >>42142202 #>>42142212 #>>42142251 #>>42142326 #>>42142345 #>>42142452 #>>42142625 #>>42143095 #>>42143203 #>>42144003 #>>42144503 #
1. drdaeman ◴[14 Nov 24 23:18 UTC] No.42142326[source]▶
Scummy companies won't magically disappear or stop scummy practices. We can and should blame them, but it's pretty much obvious that the legislation (despite good intents!) resulted in a de-facto shitshow that failed to recognize basic social/behavior sciences, technical details, or anything else.

It should've been an user-agent centered feature rather than individual website gimmick - that's the only way it could've possibly worked. After that, companies can try to continue doing whatever shit they want to try, but none of their identifiers would be persisted unless user agent allows it. (This does not account for fingerprinting, but that's a whole other story.)

Instead, legislators made some weird decisions that failed to account for human and corporate nature (greed), and we ended up with more popups and banners than ever.

replies(1): >>42146535 #
2. account42 ◴[15 Nov 24 13:05 UTC] No.42146535[source]▶
> none of their identifiers would be persisted unless user agent allows it.

Wrong.

And the GDPR is not just for the web.

replies(1): >>42149277 #
3. drdaeman ◴[15 Nov 24 18:00 UTC] No.42149277[source]▶
> Wrong

How? I fail to understand why if a browser, configured to not persist anything by default (without a consent) would persist anything. Save for a bug, of course.