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

(nednex.com)
582 points SweetSoftPillow | 1 comments | 22 Oct 25 12:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | 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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1. Zanfa ◴[22 Oct 25 13:27 UTC] No.45668823[source]▶
Like mentioned by sibling comments, GDPR explicitly does not allow this. It's just the fact that enforcement is spotty and complicated by the fact that the responsibility is shared across all EU member states with limitations what each country can do by itself, with some countries' data protection authorities intentionally dragging their feet to protect multinationals.

It's the same issue as with most EU-wide issues, where there's always countries competing with each other at the benefit of others.

Also GDPR is not exclusive to browsers or internet, it's applicable universally, for both online and offline businesses and processes, which is why it can't and doesn't prescribe exact technical implementation details.