Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites

Although I agree the law isn’t as good as it could be. It’s also impossible to create perfect law when websites are looking to avoid the spirit of the law to begin with.

Otherwise how can we explain “please see our privacy policy and send us a sneaker email to opt out” kind of tracking options.

Yeah law is kinda like the rules in sports leagues. You have to keep updating it as the meta shits.

It's impossible to write things correctly the first or final time and especially with the interpretation of words changing over time it doesn't matter if you could.

You don't need to write the perfect law. Just write a law that has more or less the intended effect.

Imagine you write a program to do something and it doesn't work at all as expected and at the same time it causes endless annoyance to users.

A law is very similar to a program. It's software for the society. It didn't work and the authors are blaming everybody except themselves.

Rules in sports are always being adjusted, and participants are always looking for (barely legal) ways to get around them.

Example: In cycling, they banned narrow handlebars. There's an aero advantage, but it was seen as a safety problem. So cyclists canted their brake hoods way inside, rested their hands on the brake hoods, and got an aero advantage.

And now there's a rule about brake hoods. Laws are meant only be living things that change as society changes, and also change to patch what we might call "exploits." You are perfectly correct: It's never one and done, it's an ongoing process.

The difference between a law an a program is that the computer isn't a malicious actor trying to do everything in it's power to subvert the law. A law is nothing like a program, because a computer will do nothing without a program, but societies do all sorts of things regardless of laws.

Of course the politicians share a portion of the blame, but we cannot ignore the fact that websites are just playing the blame game as well.

We’re also seeing tracking despite the lack of user consent as well. This could be a fluke but when I make anonymous search on website and switch to another, I’m seeing the product I have just searched in the ads. With all the tracking disabled I mind you.

This is part of why a lot of EU directives are almost 50% "why this law is necessary and what we're trying to achieve", 30% "what needs to be implemented", and then 20% "who's going to look after all of this and how".

That way, a misplaced comma or a wonky sentence doesn't allow for easy loopholes that need tighter laws to fix issues.

Now law text will work forever, but this format makes for a very solid foundation.

> You don't need to write the perfect law. Just write a law that has more or less the intended effect.

What is the unintended consequence of GDPR?

The world a program works in and the computer it runs on are often very malicious, or they sure act like they are. Not to talk about users, some are pure evil :-)

We put a lot of safeguards, exception handling and all kind of measures to control errors.

But, but... we're the good guys, we're just fighting those evil advertisers!

I don't know if they'll finally find a way to control the spying, but how many years have passed since they made the law?