MR website is a classic example of the misuse of cookies. As pointed out the one good thing about cookies is that it can be used to remember logins for sites just like this BUT then you look at the cookie more deeply and you see there is over 400 companies that MR gives your information to.
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Europe Wants to Cut Down on Annoying GDPR Cookie Pop-Ups
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The law should have forced web browsers to use some kind of standard instead.
Now there are different kinds of layouts and implementations, and for every new site we have to set our preferences.
It's also a PITA for web developers to implement.
It outright disgusts me that it's taken them this long to even start talking about how to fix the global disaster they caused.
I will be clear: Tracking cookies disgust me, as does the "analytics" rot that turn five paragraphs of plain text into a 5MB blob of CPU-burning privacy invasion. I use blockers in an attempt to fight the monstrosity the web has turned into, and if they break a site, I no longer turn them off, I just go somewhere else.
And from that perspective, a law that tries to at least force companies to ask about their abhorrent tracking systems is, conceptually, useful. It was the right idea.
But when the way you write the law creates a global disaster of "accept" buttons and buried, deceptively-named reject systems such that 99.9% of people just give up and click "accept" anyway, you screwed up. Badly. Their failure at consequence-prediction and lack of follow-up has wasted little bits of time every single day for billions of people, plus further expanded the infrastructure required to implement and circumvent it wasting countless person-hours of developer and designer time, and in the end has a vanishingly small real effect.
Seriously: There are a little over 5 billion internet users. If, as a conservative average, those people visit just a single website a day with a GDPR cookie pop-up, and it takes 1 second to click or tap "accept" (and alternately an average of 1 extra second to scroll so they can see what was under the pop-up) they have cumulatively wasted 158 years of human life every single day. Or, phrased differently, every year the distributed equivalent of 1.2 million full-time-job-years worth of labor is wasted clicking "accept", very roughly what it took to build one of the Great Pyramids.
Maybe that would be worth it, cumulatively, if it actually had the desired effect, but the reality is that the vast majority of people just click "accept" or ignore the popup entirely (which I assume is equivalent), so all that time was wasted for almost no real-world gain or change.
It's worse if people actually don't want to be tracked--some sites have a "deny" button that only takes a second to click, but many require clicking through one or two more pop-up screens, and flipping several toggles, to actually reject things. I'll guesstimate that half the sites I visit with a GDPR pop-up take 1 second to click "deny", and the other half take at least 15 seconds to actually get through the denial process.
If I optimistically assume that I only see a couple GDPR sites on average per day, that means that I personally spend maybe an hour and a half a year just working to click "reject".
I will be clear: Tracking cookies disgust me, as does the "analytics" rot that turn five paragraphs of plain text into a 5MB blob of CPU-burning privacy invasion. I use blockers in an attempt to fight the monstrosity the web has turned into, and if they break a site, I no longer turn them off, I just go somewhere else.
And from that perspective, a law that tries to at least force companies to ask about their abhorrent tracking systems is, conceptually, useful. It was the right idea.
But when the way you write the law creates a global disaster of "accept" buttons and buried, deceptively-named reject systems such that 99.9% of people just give up and click "accept" anyway, you screwed up. Badly. Their failure at consequence-prediction and lack of follow-up has wasted little bits of time every single day for billions of people, plus further expanded the infrastructure required to implement and circumvent it wasting countless person-hours of developer and designer time, and in the end has a vanishingly small real effect.
Seriously: There are a little over 5 billion internet users. If, as a conservative average, those people visit just a single website a day with a GDPR cookie pop-up, and it takes 1 second to click or tap "accept" (and alternately an average of 1 extra second to scroll so they can see what was under the pop-up) they have cumulatively wasted 158 years of human life every single day. Or, phrased differently, every year the distributed equivalent of 1.2 million full-time-job-years worth of labor is wasted clicking "accept", very roughly what it took to build one of the Great Pyramids.
Maybe that would be worth it, cumulatively, if it actually had the desired effect, but the reality is that the vast majority of people just click "accept" or ignore the popup entirely (which I assume is equivalent), so all that time was wasted for almost no real-world gain or change.
It's worse if people actually don't want to be tracked--some sites have a "deny" button that only takes a second to click, but many require clicking through one or two more pop-up screens, and flipping several toggles, to actually reject things. I'll guesstimate that half the sites I visit with a GDPR pop-up take 1 second to click "deny", and the other half take at least 15 seconds to actually get through the denial process.
If I optimistically assume that I only see a couple GDPR sites on average per day, that means that I personally spend maybe an hour and a half a year just working to click "reject".
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GDPR is performative and hollow, just like everything else about the EU (except where the fascistic EU police state seeks to harm and impoverish their own citizens)
Damn Europe… make all the cookies and tracking illegals, like that we dont need to refuse all the cookies!
And worse now inside this hell pop up they hide inside some ways to get all your info so make all this s**t illegal.
And worse now inside this hell pop up they hide inside some ways to get all your info so make all this s**t illegal.
Thanks for pointing this out! MR is probably a rather profitable company, (mis-)using our clicks.
Yes, I am using that browser in my Macs and it is very nice. It comes with its own player for YouTube videos to get rid of all ads interrupting playback, without the need to configure anything. Plus you can get a basic but really good in its class VPN. DuckDuckGo web browser fights back internet infestation right out of the box.
Abandoning the European Commission does not mean abolishing the European Union.
How did you come up with that idea?
Abandoning the Commission would strengthen European Parliament and the European Council, which would mean strengthening democracy, since the Commission, which is currently the decisive body, is not elected by citizens.
Consumer protection is of course a good thing but I can't for the light of day see the reason why you need to accept cookie every damn time. So good on them!
I don't like the idea of the EU requiring browsers to build anything. I do like the idea of requiring any organization who wants to store cookies or track users being required to accept a pre-formatted/standard selection that could be stored in a browsers setting (if the browser author wants it there), ideally this could be global or a per website (or organization) preference. If there is no preference response then the site has to pop-up the consent form.
It is up to websites whether to ask or not. They gave users permission to reject them. Its kind of like blaming the government for recommending people put doors in offices to prevent the spread of fire due to the inconvenience of having to open them every time you leave a room.
If they had any real balls they'd ban all web advertising within the EU. This would essentially reset the internet back to the good old days of 1995 when it was all self-hosted hobbyists, forums and corporate web pages.
I reckon they could turn it into a FaceID passkey saved to your iPhone rather than a server easily enough.
The popups are infuriating and some sites designed theirs to prevent anything other than full acceptance of cookies.
Very good that you can set a Browser flag and NEVER get asked for cookie policy again!!!
And over all, big brother will grow even bigger and bigger . Everyone’s needs your data in a pool package to control you and predict your behavior
This is not good.
Anyway, this is only a proposal and has to get passed in the EU parliament.
Not sure if this was sarcastic, but I'll assume it wasn't.
Imagine for a moment that a service like IMDB can no longer monetize through advertisement. Or snopes or Macrumors, or Google, DuckDuckGo, etc...
How much are you willing to spend for search, or anything you view online. Corporate web sites could build the cost into their advertising budget (like they did in the 90s, some still do). But "self-hosted" sites would disappear pretty quickly, not many hobbyist could afford to become popular. Most forums would go away, cause users aren't going to pay. Reddit, gone, CNN, FOX, The Guardian, gone. Luckily, you'd still have state run news, that's always reliable /s.
Do you remember using the internet in the 90s? It was new and cool. But it was also dialup, which didn't matter much cause there wasn't really that much to see.
I'm not crazy about ads, but I'm also not crazy about paying subscriptions for everything I do or might want to do.
Some of us are old enough to remember when web browsers, Internet Explorer included!, added a "Do Not Track" checkbox, that every website proceeded to completely ignore (since there was no force of law behind it).