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

(nednex.com)
583 points SweetSoftPillow | 1 comments | 22 Oct 25 12:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | 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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michaelmauderer ◴[22 Oct 25 13:02 UTC] No.45668443[source]▶
But the courts are saying: the law does NOT allow this.

So maybe “malicious compliance” is a misnomer. We should just call it "illegal dark pattern".

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ferongr ◴[22 Oct 25 13:28 UTC] No.45668841[source]▶
Please post some judicial decisions regarding your claim.
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ruszki ◴[22 Oct 25 13:47 UTC] No.45669096[source]▶
Sometimes I understand these kind of comments, sometimes I don’t. In this case, it’s quicker to find such decisions than writing your comment.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Administrative-court-Cookie-ban...

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1. anonymous908213 ◴[22 Oct 25 16:51 UTC] No.45671884[source]▶
I do love the irony of reading a headline "Administrative court: Cookie banner must contain "Reject all" button" on a website that does a completely blocking cookie banner with no such option. I suppose if I lived in Germany I would be pleased with the results of reporting that to the authorities.

More generally, I actually did organically notice the massive increase in "Reject all" buttons and found out about these court decisions myself some time ago. Certainly a small win for the internet, although it should not have taken 9 years(!) from the implementation of GDPR for these violations of it to be cracked down on.