Couchers is officially out of beta

God I hate the GDPR with a passion. The amount of time I've wasted clicking those stupid popups.

That hate is entirely misguided, and an indication of how far you’re been tricked by the ones violating your data.

It’s as if companies had been pissing in your beer for decades, then a law passed saying you could only do that with consent, and now you’re complaining that there are all these consent forms every time you want to drink your pissed beer instead of taking it as an indicator to buy from another brand.

If anything, the GDPR should have been more aggressive and made all extraneous data collection outright illegal with no option to opt-in. As it stands, it’s still a powerful indicator of those you cannot trust, letting you know as soon as you open their website.

I disagree with the framing of "pissing in beer". To me it's more like companies have been giving me hot coffee for decades and now every time I get one they have to tell me, "careful! It's hot!" Like, yeah, I know, just give me the dang coffee.

There should be a browser setting that just answers yes/no for you. Not an extension, or a hack. A setting that is read on page load and doesn't interrupt me.

Everyone wants hot coffee. If you hadn’t been getting hot coffee in the past, you’d have asked for it, but if you hadn’t been getting your data mined (or piss in your beer) you might not have noticed but would’ve been better off if it hadn’t happened.

Furthermore, temperature is an essential feature of coffee, so under the GDPR you don’t need to tell or ask users about it. Piss and data mining are not essential features.

So websites are already serving you hot coffee (or cold beer) but then saying “I really really really want to piss in your drink, please allow it”. Previously they just pissed without asking. Which is why the mandatory warning is useful, it immediately signals they are pissers and you should probably go somewhere else. Especially when you click to see their “partners” and it’s a list of literally eight hundred entities wanting to pee in your drink.

GDPR covers more than cookies though. It covers different usages of the same data even, so it's not simply a matter of providing/not providing the data. For example, an e-commerce site needs your address to deliver your package (legitimate interest, no consent required), but if they want to send spam to it or resell that data to a data broker they still need to ask for consent first.

fair, but then don't ask me when the page loads. ask me when I fill out the order, and even better, put GDPR: <question>

asking up-front allows them the anti-pattern of giving me 40+ choices of what to opt-in or out of, and it allows the anti-pattern of using confusing language to confuse people (uncheck the box to revoke the widthrawal of refusal to copying your PI)

Doing it properly requires actually complying with the GDPR - deferring non-essential data processing until consent has been given, storing that consent status somewhere, etc.

Or, you can just do the fake-compliance approach by slapping the same cookie banner everyone else uses and call it a day.

> it allows the anti-pattern of using confusing language to confuse people

FYI, that is not compliant either, but again, we've already established 90% of the players out there don't bother with real compliance and just do what everyone else does - and it works, because enforcement doesn't really exist anyway.

This is an absolutely idiotic suggestion.

ah name calling, now that takes effort.