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

(nednex.com)
583 points SweetSoftPillow | 2 comments | 22 Oct 25 12:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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michaelmauderer ◴[22 Oct 25 12:36 UTC] No.45668112[source]▶
The problem here is not the law, but malicious compliance by websites that don't want to give up tracking.

"Spend Five Minutes in a Menu of Legalese" is not the intended alternative to "Accept All". "Decline All" is! And this is starting to be enforced through the courts, so you're increasingly seeing the "Decline All" option right away. As it should be. https://www.techspot.com/news/108043-german-court-takes-stan...

Of course, also respecting a Do-Not-Track header and avoiding the cookie banner entirely while not tracking the user, would be even better.

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crazygringo ◴[22 Oct 25 12:52 UTC] No.45668318[source]▶
No, the problem is 100% the law, because it was written in a way that allows this type of malicious compliance.

Laws need to be written well to achieve good outcomes. If the law allows for malicious compliance, it is a badly written law.

The sites are just trying to maximize profit, as anyone could predict. So write better laws.

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itopaloglu83 ◴[22 Oct 25 12:57 UTC] No.45668365[source]▶
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.

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narag ◴[22 Oct 25 13:05 UTC] No.45668471[source]▶
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.

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1. thesuitonym ◴[22 Oct 25 13:24 UTC] No.45668782[source]▶
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.
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2. narag ◴[22 Oct 25 18:09 UTC] No.45672956[source]▶
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.