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

(nednex.com)
599 points SweetSoftPillow | 1 comments | 22 Oct 25 12:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | 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. pas ◴[23 Oct 25 09:52 UTC] No.45680078[source]▶
nah, it's just slow, as unfortunately almost all things involving technology and international/supranational organizations

first case was around 2018-2019 and then it took some time for the cookie banner consent thing to percolate through the courts. (the Hungarian data protection agency already issued a ~3000 EUR fine in 2018-08 and cited the GDPR. and the Hungarian DPA cites this 2019 EU court case which is explicitly about cookie consent [1])

and according to this tracker - https://noyb.eu/en - there are 2B fines already imposed and (883 total cases and still 468 pending)

[1] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...