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

(legiscope.com)
332 points vegasbrianc | 8 comments | 14 Nov 24 22:23 UTC | HN request time: 1.055s | source | bottom
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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.

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legitster ◴[14 Nov 24 23:04 UTC] No.42142202[source]▶
> never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites

Part of the problem is that the law didn't seek to distinguish between tame first-party cookies and the really naughty third-party cookies so the burden is equal regardless of how malicious the service is.

> For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software engineer to code up a banner.

This is actually not true. There's a lot more that goes into a cookie banner than you might realize, and there's now an industry dominated by a small handful of players (Osano vs OneTrust)

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ffsm8 ◴[14 Nov 24 23:11 UTC] No.42142245[source]▶
It did though? You don't need a banner for actually legitimate use (session Cookie, settings, etc)

The things they're calling legitimate use just isn't, which is why they need banners.

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1. legitster ◴[14 Nov 24 23:27 UTC] No.42142396[source]▶
The elephant in the room is that almost no one wants to host website without at least some sort of website analytics service, which does not fall under legitimate use. So that's why even a small blog is going to have a cookie banner.

There are some analytics companies out there that advertise cookieless analytics, but they are either a) too simple for enterprise or b) a much, much worse privacy and compliance risk.

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2. ffsm8 ◴[15 Nov 24 00:29 UTC] No.42142801[source]▶
Even this can be done without a banner, as long as these analytics do not contain any way to link them to individuals/specific users

It's admittedly sound advice to create a banner for such a usecase however, as sanitizing all user data from these events is hard to guarantee, and you'd have to do just that to keep it legal

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3. Earw0rm ◴[15 Nov 24 07:59 UTC] No.42144795[source]▶
The other elephant is that while everyone has analytics, only one in five companies pays someone with an actual clue how to interpret them to look at them regularly, and only one in five of those companies has a decision making structure that allows them to act meaningfully in response to insights gained.
4. XCSme ◴[15 Nov 24 12:30 UTC] No.42146295[source]▶
I think it's impossible to be 100% legal.

Many times, the user IP, which is considered PII, is stored in various servers/routers log that you have no access to...

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5. account42 ◴[15 Nov 24 12:51 UTC] No.42146454[source]▶
Well, too bad.

When it comes to processing other people's data you don't get to do whatever you want.

Maybe try running a website without analytics before throwing a tantrum.

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6. ryandrake ◴[15 Nov 24 16:32 UTC] No.42148424[source]▶
Yea, companies are so used to laissez faire that when they're finally told "too bad, so sad" they throw a tantrum, sue, cry, and eventually comply as maliciously as the possibly can, to show the world how upset they are that they can't simply do whatever they want.
7. ◴[15 Nov 24 16:52 UTC] No.42148595{3}[source]▶
8. ffsm8 ◴[15 Nov 24 17:07 UTC] No.42148724{3}[source]▶
Lots of misinformation on the internet wrt this, and I am not a lawyer either.

It's especially tragic because Google serves you countless factually incorrect articles if you search for gdpr, which doesn't help with this endless amount of confusion.

You might be interested to know that an IP address isn't actually PII, because that's a concept of California privacy regulation and they don't care about them

https://techgdpr.com/blog/difference-between-pii-and-persona...

It's a different story for gdprs personal data however. Because there are individuals with static IPs - which makes it possible to link these IP addresses to individuals. If you could only omit these, you could technically use ipadresses however you want too. But I admit that that's kinda unrealistic ( • ‿ • )