Serious question. Can anyone tell me how we are safer / better for the cookie warning clicking I have to do on the internet? Advertisers still own your browsing habits and the world expends a collective bazillion hours a week on a needless friction.

@RGB_Lights Proponents say that cookie banners are deliberate abuse of the regulation (to condition users to accept whatever, I think?). IMO if the regulation allows abuse of this extent it is not a good regulation.

@buherator @RGB_Lights
I’m sure our legislators will take note and refine it further.
(Well, okay, right now they are too busy fellating ChatControl, but I’m sure fixing this is next on their list.)

@dcoderlt @RGB_Lights This has been going on for years even before the UA war (a bit higher prio in all areas), and this is part of the reason why I can't accept the abuse argument: if this is abuse, why has nobody done anything about it?

@RGB_Lights I enjoy hiding those banners with Safari’s Hide Distracting Items feature.

@RGB_Lights @buherator It’s really not helping. All it does is cause alert fatigue. We’re in this situation, because the EU didn’t have the spine to tell online advertisers (and other surveillance capitalists) to find a healthy business model. The Do-Not-Track Header Clients can opt in to would have been a perfectly fine solution. Instead, we have the banners deliberately violating GDPR (e.g. pay up or get tracked is illegal).

@schrotthaufen @RGB_Lights Cookie banners are not paywalls, let's not confuse the two issues...

@buherator @RGB_Lights There are a lot of news outlets that use the cookie banners to coerce visitors into subscribing. It’s literally “Allow all cookies”, and “Pay to not have ads”.

@schrotthaufen @RGB_Lights That's not a reason for us to make (and reinforce) the same confusion.

@buherator @RGB_Lights @dcoderlt I think abuse is still abuse even when nobody is (visibly) doing anything about it. Just because it is generally accepted does not mean it is okay.

@infosecdj @RGB_Lights @dcoderlt Nobody says it's OK to abuse. I'm saying it's best to prevent abuse and that it's not OK to let the abuse to continue for years.

@buherator Ah okay, got confused a bit there, sorry.

@buherator @RGB_Lights 1. DoNotTrack is industry self-regulation and generic, not specifying cookies only, but the whole tracking. We have it but industry does not care.
2. E-Privacy directive mandates consent for tracking cookies, industry subverts the law and exploits warning fatigue, while all other tracking mechanisms are out of scope for the cookie banner consent, furthermore this is an old relic of the oughties.

1/n

@buherator @RGB_Lights 3. GDPR is a more modern and holistic approach which mandates consent in general for all PII and pseudonymous information, and thus encompasses everything not only cookies. but lacks strong and well funded enforcement institutions.
2/n

@buherator @RGB_Lights the fact that the e-privacy directive is so annoyingly abused and circumvented, is the result of corrupt (mostly conservative and social democrats) politicians spitlicking industry-interests and installing all these loopholes, and not funding the enforcement of good regulation.
3/4

@buherator @RGB_Lights furthermore the eprivacy directive has been in review and update since 2017, which more or less finished by the european parliament in 2021, and since then more or less "filibustered" by the council, and thus this review is now spanning 3 parliamentary terms already. see: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/procedure/EN/2017_3 and https://parltrack.org/dossier/2017/0003(COD)

@buherator @RGB_Lights

footnotes:

- the council: is the set of the ministers of the relevant portfolios of the member states.

- enforcement doesn't get politicians re-elected, making new laws gets them re-elected. weak enforcement means unhappy electorate demanding better laws. a vicious cycle.

@buherator @RGB_Lights @schrotthaufen Some are. Like spiegel.de where you can choose between allow tracking cookies or pay for subscription. No opt out of tracking available. Probably not legal, but they argue that they need this to survive and that you still have some choice.

@http https://infosec.place/notice/AnT3F4ZJnv3E2JfKng