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

(nednex.com)
582 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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hananova ◴[22 Oct 25 13:14 UTC] No.45668630[source]▶
But the law never allowed this. Enforcement just turned out to be an issue due to the enormity of it all.

Also, please remember that in Europe there is no such thing as "the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law." The intent of the law IS the law.

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1. aleph_minus_one ◴[22 Oct 25 22:42 UTC] No.45676087{3}[source]▶
> Also, please remember that in Europe there is no such thing as "the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law." The intent of the law IS the law.

On the other hand, there is the issue how the intent of laws (which were often passed by highly incompetent politicians, in particular when IT topics are involved) is to be interpreted.

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2. pas ◴[23 Oct 25 10:02 UTC] No.45680151[source]▶
as long as we cannot provide some objective foundations for the meaning of words we're pretty much left with the law constantly being interpreted, and even if somehow laws and enforcement becomes completely independent of the fallibility of human minds, as long as we are subject to it we ourselves will have different interpretation from time to time

and even if the law somehow becomes a perfect ideal filter for separating good from bad ... its enforcement will run into the problem of false positives and negatives as long as it deals with messy real world events and their various imperfect impressions found in whatever evidence is collected in a case.

well, of course a more competent electorate and politicians would be nice anyway, but now we run into the problem of competence in the eyes of who?