<story><title>Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law</title><url>https://www.amazingcto.com/cookie-banners-are-not-needed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lynx23</author><text>If it only were that simple.  When the GDPR came out, a lot of confusion and misunderstanding ensued.  Not only regarding the damn cookie banner.  Even totally legitimate health-care providers started to collect signatures to be on the safe side.  I still rememeber receiving a basic GDPR training where we were told that opt-out&amp;#x2F;signing is only necessary if the entity is planning to do weird stuff with your data.  IOW, if someone wants you to sign, they plan a bad move.  Then my bank wanted a signature.  And a month later, one of my healthcare providers wanted a signature.  After a chat with him, I learnt that his lawyer told him to collect the signatures just in case, and made him believe that if someone doesn&amp;#x27;t sign, that is a problem.&lt;p&gt;So now we have this situation where providers were trained to play the GDPR in such a way that they will never have a problem, no matter what they actually do with the data.&lt;p&gt;And consumers are pissed because they are made to sign things which essentially reduce their rights...&lt;p&gt;And if someone (like me) thinks the EU did a half-assed job there, the downvotes rain in.</text></item><item><author>CipherThrowaway</author><text>Agree. How much corporate propaganda are people consuming that legislators are seen as wholly responsible for the bad behavior and malicious compliance actions of corporations?&lt;p&gt;What does it say about the relationship between businesses and consumers that the first response to this bad behavior is to shout &amp;quot;look what you made them do!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Seemingly it is everyone&amp;#x27;s fault except the bad actors themselves.</text></item><item><author>nolok</author><text>Imagine a market in which companies charge a lot of hidden fees behind their customers&amp;#x27; back, and users are not happy when they realize after the fact. The law is updated to say you are not allowed to charge the user a fee unless you tell him in advance.&lt;p&gt;Companies with tons of hidden fees decide to keep them but force you to read all the fees on every page of the menu before you can see the rest of the text, in the most annoying way possible, and promote the idea that the issue is not the extravagant fees, nor the fact that the companies hide them before and had to be forced by law to warn you about them, no the problem is a law that force them to tell you what you&amp;#x27;re getting into before it&amp;#x27;s too late !&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s, essentially, what&amp;#x27;s happening. And we have people complain that companies need to display their fees.&lt;p&gt;On this issue in the group that complain about the cookie law there are some people who are very wrong on purpose because it&amp;#x27;s in their interest, and some people who are very wrong because they genuinely don&amp;#x27;t understand the position they&amp;#x27;re defending, complaining about being made aware of the fee, instead of the fees themselves or the fact that the companies hide them if not forced by law.&lt;p&gt;To each their own belief about which category PG fits into.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HelloNurse</author><text>Incompetent lawyers and managers did a half-assed job, and some exemplary fines will motivate them with respect to the other half.</text></comment>
<story><title>Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law</title><url>https://www.amazingcto.com/cookie-banners-are-not-needed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lynx23</author><text>If it only were that simple.  When the GDPR came out, a lot of confusion and misunderstanding ensued.  Not only regarding the damn cookie banner.  Even totally legitimate health-care providers started to collect signatures to be on the safe side.  I still rememeber receiving a basic GDPR training where we were told that opt-out&amp;#x2F;signing is only necessary if the entity is planning to do weird stuff with your data.  IOW, if someone wants you to sign, they plan a bad move.  Then my bank wanted a signature.  And a month later, one of my healthcare providers wanted a signature.  After a chat with him, I learnt that his lawyer told him to collect the signatures just in case, and made him believe that if someone doesn&amp;#x27;t sign, that is a problem.&lt;p&gt;So now we have this situation where providers were trained to play the GDPR in such a way that they will never have a problem, no matter what they actually do with the data.&lt;p&gt;And consumers are pissed because they are made to sign things which essentially reduce their rights...&lt;p&gt;And if someone (like me) thinks the EU did a half-assed job there, the downvotes rain in.</text></item><item><author>CipherThrowaway</author><text>Agree. How much corporate propaganda are people consuming that legislators are seen as wholly responsible for the bad behavior and malicious compliance actions of corporations?&lt;p&gt;What does it say about the relationship between businesses and consumers that the first response to this bad behavior is to shout &amp;quot;look what you made them do!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Seemingly it is everyone&amp;#x27;s fault except the bad actors themselves.</text></item><item><author>nolok</author><text>Imagine a market in which companies charge a lot of hidden fees behind their customers&amp;#x27; back, and users are not happy when they realize after the fact. The law is updated to say you are not allowed to charge the user a fee unless you tell him in advance.&lt;p&gt;Companies with tons of hidden fees decide to keep them but force you to read all the fees on every page of the menu before you can see the rest of the text, in the most annoying way possible, and promote the idea that the issue is not the extravagant fees, nor the fact that the companies hide them before and had to be forced by law to warn you about them, no the problem is a law that force them to tell you what you&amp;#x27;re getting into before it&amp;#x27;s too late !&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s, essentially, what&amp;#x27;s happening. And we have people complain that companies need to display their fees.&lt;p&gt;On this issue in the group that complain about the cookie law there are some people who are very wrong on purpose because it&amp;#x27;s in their interest, and some people who are very wrong because they genuinely don&amp;#x27;t understand the position they&amp;#x27;re defending, complaining about being made aware of the fee, instead of the fees themselves or the fact that the companies hide them if not forced by law.&lt;p&gt;To each their own belief about which category PG fits into.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>orwin</author><text>I kinda hate saying this, but Microsoft (or at least github) got it right in a week. Some OSS publishers also got it right, like nexedi, and some i&amp;#x27;m sightly upset with (gitlab) but it is true that for the commercial internet it seems to be invasive. I do not use the commercial internet much, and like any person with greasemonkey, i took a rainy afternoon to remove the most annoying banners (i think now i use a plugin that does it for me).</text></comment>