As an EU citizen, I'm extremely happy for the way the EU is pushing back on the tech giants. It's empowering.
The GDPR, in my opinion, turned out to be a terrific first step (which does not mean it does not have its issues). It's been a rocky two+ years, but most sites are already up to a point where they actually give me a way to express my consent, or (more importantly) to object to processing on grounds of legitimate interest (which is where advertisers come in).
And that's just one example. The GDPR starts with the following sentence (in recital 1): The protection of natural persons in relation to the processing of personal data is a fundamental right. And the EU is living up to it.
It's empowering to actually have a say in how one's own data is being processed, rather than just being the product at someone else's mercy.
I can only welcome any further steps in this direction. I have no issues with some entity getting rich and powerful, the problem is when they get too powerful.
As a European citizen, I'm tired of having to close hundreds of popups a day which purposefully use dark patterns to make it harder to unselect everything and just close and make it easy to accept everything in one click.
This is what happens when you get incompetent non technical people to regulate on things.
Most people still just accept everything and we get terrible, government mandated ui.
Oh and let's not forget all the foreign websites I can't access anymore because they're not compliant and required to block traffic from EU.
Why can't I read anymore local USA newspapers?
Is this freedom?
It's the EU that it's getting too powerful (unless we look at the economy)
Weird, I manually opt out of everything on most websites I visit and I find it pretty straightforward. There's only a handful of flows that most websites use, so it's not that difficult. There are some egregious exceptions (Yahoo being a particularly annoying one), but that's a small number of cases and, in most cases, it makes me realise I didn't actually care that much about reading their content, so I just move on.
Also, the dark patterns are not a result of the law, but a result of insufficient law enforcement. If the EU comissions starts going after a few websites that employ particularly dark patterns for consent, you'll see everyone fall in line.
> Is this freedom?
Yup, it's that website's freedom to block EU traffic.
> it's that website's freedom to block EU traffic.
But the point is that a bunch of people don't want to be blocked from using that website, and it is because of the problems with the GDPR.
The OP was talking about "their" freedom to access that website. GDPR claims to support his freedom, but all it has done is resulting in him being unable to access local american news websites.
Which does not seem like it helps his freedom much at all.
You know they are tricking you?
The websites make it annoying as possible so you think it's the EUs fault.
How about just stop the tracking and give me an option to turn it on if I want?
It's the newspaper's choice to exclude you. Nothing in the law requires it. Proof: the website you're currently using. The New York Times. Really anything except the Backwater End Times and The Suburbian Dystopia Monthly
As you well know, using 'Backwater End Times and The Suburbian Dystopia Monthly' as examples is disingenuous. Mildly amusing but deliberately misses the point. For the newspaper it's the law of diminishing returns as regards far-flung readers.
> It's the newspaper's choice to exclude you. Nothing in the law requires it.
The EU makes a law, and suddenly a bunch of newspapers choose to exclude europeans.
> Really anything except the Backwater End Times and The Suburbian Dystopia Monthly
Sour grapes thinking. If that were really the case people wouldn't notice it at all. You click on a link because it interests you, then see that as a european you can't access it and then tell yourself that it didn't actually interest you.
>As a European citizen, I'm tired of having to close hundreds of popups a day which purposefully use dark patterns to make it harder to unselect everything and just close and make it easy to accept everything in one click.
There's a terrific browser extension called Consent Manager [1] that automatizes it.
I click "reject all" (+dark pattern "object" to "legitimate interest").
If a site wants me to do that all individually, I close the window. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Oh, and I probably should report them, because it's almost certainly illegal.
And yes, this is freedom. The freedom for me to choose. I can still click "accept all" if I want to. I couldn't before, and I didn't even know how much there was.
What you meant is "convenience". Freedom is not always convenient.
> As a European citizen, I'm tired of having to close hundreds of popups a day which purposefully use dark patterns to make it harder to unselect everything and just close and make it easy to accept everything in one click.
Well, this is exactly the thing that's illegal under GDPR. Don't blame the regulator if websites are blatantly not complying with the law.
Yeah, and it seems to me that it slowly has been getting better (as websites keep being fined?), so looks like the law is working? (I would have preferred this to be handled in the browser itself though...)
> As a European citizen, I'm tired of having to close hundreds of popups a day which purposefully use dark patterns to make it harder to unselect everything and just close and make it easy to accept everything in one click.
The popups is the tiny, visible part of the GDPR. The rest of the iceberg that is the GDPR is that those sites already had to think about how they handle your data.
I hope the popups thing will be resolved by clarification and some stiff example-making fines. Hopefully those examples make it clear that no kind of "optional" tracking can be included via a prominent "Accept and continue" button and that all such default actions must lead to zero tracking/third party ad cookies being used. Once sites realize that almost no one will make an effort and actively enable tracking, these things will disapppear (as will a lot of the sites that can't find alternative revenue - this is a good thing)
> This is what happens when you get incompetent non technical people to regulate on things.
I think GDPR, and the so-called "cookie law" before it, was done pretty competently. The principles are pretty clear: data policies/controllers/etc. have to be explicit and limited; personal data collection requires consent of the people involved; opting into a service implies consent for data required by that service (e.g. cookies for shopping carts, local storage for highscores, etc.); if consent isn't implied, it must be requested explicitly.
Explicit consent is a last resort, and only required when collecting personal data which (a) isn't directly required to provide a service or (b) comes from people who aren't users of your service (i.e. who haven't opted in). Advertising is a good example, since the "users" of an ad network (those opting to use it) are the people buying and selling ad space; people viewing those ads aren't users (they haven't opted in); and advertising isn't required to provide a service (e.g. a news site; it might be indirectly required, for raising revenue, but the site would work just the same with any revenue source).
The fact you're tired of popups shows that GDPR is working; the extent of data collection, surveillance, etc. has been brought to the surface. Your anger is misdirected though: it's not GDPR's fault that so many surveillance organisations are trying to track and target you; quite the opposite!
> make it easy to accept everything in one click
> Is this freedom?
Do you think it would be "freedom" to waive all of your waivable rights, to anyone and everyone who asks, without even knowing they asked? That's what an automated banner-clicker would be doing, since consent popups are not restricted to talking about cookies (just like GDPR isn't about cookies); they can ask for pretty much anything. In fact, I imagine many of them ask for more than they're legally allowed (this happens all the time, e.g. many privacy policies do this, many "warranty void if removed" stickers are not legally enforcable, etc.).
If you'd instead rather tell your browser to accept certain pre-selected terms which you're comfortable with, then you're in luck! There's a standard for that called P3P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P It's not supported by Chrome, but you can enable it in Firefox, as long as you're using version 2 (it was removed in Firefox 3). Then you just need to convince every Web site you visit to implement it. Good luck!
It absolutely is the fault of GDPR that now a bunch of websites in the US are blocking him.
There was a new law, and now a bunch of newspapers responded to that law. As predicted.
It was entirely predicted that this was going to be the result of GDPR. It should be obvious that some companies would simply block people from the EU, and those people could be worse off for being blocked.
> The fact you're tired of popups shows that GDPR is working
But the person does not want those popups. They simply don't care that much about data tracking. And instead, they are more annoyed by the popups. This is a negative consequence that you have to recognize.
> Do you think it would be "freedom" to waive all of your waivable rights
Well here is a better solution. The people who want the popups to show up, all the time, with the horrible UI, could have that. But what if, for everyone else, we had a single click button that said "ignore all this GDPR stuff, and go back to how it was before".
That way, people for prefer the frequent popups can have them, and the people who don't want that, can just agree to all of it, at once, and not have to worry about it anymore, if we choose do so.
This comment always comes up and the answer is always the same.
The dark patterns are straight up non-compliant with the law. The GDPR mandates about 0 of those popups, it's the shitty companies that "comply" because they want to abuse your data that make those popups.
Same with the foreign newspapers, they're _not_ required to block anything. They just chose to because it's somehow easier to block traffic than to not track them.
>As an EU citizen, I'm extremely happy for the way the EU is pushing back on the tech giants. It's empowering.
Let's not kid ourselves, the main reason EU is pushing against them so easily is that they're not European so they have nothing to lose.
See how little resistance from the EU, VW and other EU major car manufacturers faced with emission cheating/scandals and the amount of lobbying they do.
If Google and Facebook would be locally home grown and provide tens of thousands of well paid jobs and billions in tax revenue to the EU economy, not to mention provide the EU with a global (surveillance)hegemony on tech, it would be safe to assume the EU would let many of the current things slide.
> See how little resistance from the EU, VW and other EU major car manufacturers face with emissions.
The EU consistently puts down very strict regulations regarding emissions and with the new 2021 laws it's predicted VW alone will have to pay 4.5 billion euro fines to the EU for not reaching the emission targets. It's one of the reasons they started selling the ID.3 when it was only half-finished.
> If Google and Facebook would be locally home grown [...] it would be safe to assume the EU would let many of the current things slide.
These laws are not designed to hit only Google and Facebook they are hitting tech in general, including local companies. If the EU were to have any locally home grown tech companies to speak of, it would be safe to assume the EU would let many of the current things slide.
I can only assume the EU gave up completely on its own businesses to ever be able to compete with any US tech company. These regulations upon regulations increasing the bar of entry continuously practically guarantee that there won't ever be a competitor to any US tech company coming out of the EU.
The EU can empower citizens with anti tech corporate action while also dropping the ball whean dealing with European car manufacturers. It's not either/or.
> Let's not kid ourselves, the main reason EU is pushing against them so easily is that they're not European so they have nothing to lose.
Data protection in the EU goes back to before Facebook was even founded. Google was still a small startup. The GDPR was just the next iteration of it.
In any case, even if that were the case, then recognizing the right to one's own data as a fundamental right would just be an empty pretext.
> See how little resistance from the EU, VW and other EU major car manufacturers faced with emission cheating/scandals and the amount of lobbying they do.
It's possible for someone to do well in one area, and to perform badly in another.
As a counterpoint, the GDPR has been enforced just as strongly against European banks, for example.
Edit: here you go, the first EU incarnation that recognizes the rights of individual to their data, published in October 1995 (when none of these tech giants even existed):
I like the fact that corporations (invented bodies) are starting to have limitations placed on them and maybe they can't argue their way out.
This isn't because I dislike capitalism or business - they really enrich everyone -- it's just that checks and balances are always better for everyone.
I still think GDPR should have regulated the DNT header. Scoped, what it means to say "non-functional" cookies, or whatever they're called in the popups. Then we could have had just one switch in the browser.
The GDPR, in my opinion, turned out to be a terrific first step (which does not mean it does not have its issues). It's been a rocky two+ years, but most sites are already up to a point where they actually give me a way to express my consent, or (more importantly) to object to processing on grounds of legitimate interest (which is where advertisers come in).
And that's just one example. The GDPR starts with the following sentence (in recital 1): The protection of natural persons in relation to the processing of personal data is a fundamental right. And the EU is living up to it.
It's empowering to actually have a say in how one's own data is being processed, rather than just being the product at someone else's mercy.
I can only welcome any further steps in this direction. I have no issues with some entity getting rich and powerful, the problem is when they get too powerful.