Under GDPR, I believe that would be accurate. I think CCPA was to some extent inspired by GDPR so I wouldn't be surprised if they copied this point too.
Which, hilariously, means that under GDPR, you only need to contact the web site, and they have to go talk to their 1207 partners that value your privacy to fulfill your request (I'm sure that in practice they'll say "sorry it's all 'anonymous' so we can't" or "we can't be sure that it's you even though you provided the identifier from your cookies"). I'm really disappointed that NOYB hasn't started going after web sites like that - that's quickly put a damper on the whole web surveillance economy.
The really good thing about this is that if we somehow do manage to "ruin earth" and lose a significant portion of agricultural production, we will just have less tasty food rather than starving to death.
Food waste is another kind of "slack" in the food supply chain that would help. Imagine how the world would look if food supply was as optimized as e.g. microchips and then we got any kind of disruption... except now you starve rather than not being able to upgrade your car.
> You can’t grow potatoes and veggies and expect people to survive only on that.
I'm sure most medieval people survived (without food types being a detriment to their health/lifespan) on vastly less meat than most of us eat nowadays.
I don't want to live a "medieval peasant" lifestyle, obviously, but I don't think the food part of it would be unhealthy (assuming enough food).
Medieval people were a lot shorter too. When I was in Saint Basil Cathedral in Moscow I was amazed how narrow and low were the corridors inside those side towers. I hit my head multiple in that church.
(In the world graph towards the end the height seems to decrease since 1990s-this is because countries with shorter people have a higher birth rate. Within the same population the height is still increasing)
Yes, I believe we could cut beef consumption in half in the US and probably be healthier for it, without even compromising people’s standard of living (beef more as a “treat” than everyday ingredient).
We’d be healthier, and the reduction of water use from all of the crops grown for feed would eliminate all water shortages in the west
No idea how they actually do it, but I wouldn't be surprised if manual reports and actions play a big role. The policy doesn't need to be enforced reliably as long as it is plausible for reasonably big actors to get caught sooner or later and the consequences of getting caught are business-ruining.
But detecting it on a technical level shouldn't be hard either. Visit the page, take a screenshot, have an AI identify the dismiss button on the cookie/newsletter popups, scroll a bit, click something that looks inactive, check if the URL changes, trigger the back action. Once a suspicious site is identified, put it in the queue for manual review.
The URL does not even need to change, you can pushState with just a JavaScript object, catch the pop and do something like display a modal. (I use this pattern to allow closing fullscreen filter overlays the user opened)
Still, requires user interaction, on any element, once.
So the crawler needs to identify and click most likely the consent/reject button. Which may not even trigger for Googlebot.
So they likely will rely on reports or maybe even Chrome field data.
Field data is a great point - it should be really obvious when people click "back", and many then click back again immediately after (or close the tab, or whatever people do to "escape").
Because clicking on a navigation button in a web app is a good reason to window.history.pushState a state that will return the user to the place where they were when they clicked the button.
Clicking the dismiss button on the cookie banner is not a reason to push a state that will show the user a screen full of ads when they try to leave. (Mentioning the cookie banner because AFAIK Chrome requires a "user gesture" before pushState works normally, https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/T8d4_...)
But a paywall is a rather useless page, so it shouldn't be shown in search results. Normally, serving Google one page (e.g. a full article) and showing users something else (e.g. a paywall) would be grounds to ban that site forever, but Google built a special exemption for paywalls.
Showing search results that the user can't actually use is user hostile. It's essentially an ad disguised as a search result, with the problem that those ads displace other results that I might actually be able to read.
Of course, if the policy was to not index paywalled content, we might have avoided the paywallization of the Internet. Somehow, decades ago, when the Internet was smaller and there were fewer eyeballs, high quality content could successfully get monetized with non-tracking ads.
Now we have invasive ads that try to profile you, ads that are full of scams because quality control has gone out the window, and yet, somehow, everything needs to be behind a paywall...
Ideally, when I create valuable content I am paid and when I consume valuable content I don't pay. Advertising does this but I hate it so I don't want that. So ideally, there is no way to extract value from me but I am able to extract value from others. I think I would support someone who finds a way to enforce this.
But I am also willing to pay for valuable content an exorbitant amount if it is valuable enough. For instance, for absolutely critical information I might pay 0.79€ a month.
That's the problem. Every country has an alternative or ten, but what people actually need is one system that works across borders. That's the only way it reaches enough critical mass to be useful internationally beyond the EU, which nowadays is a requirement for it to be able to replace Visa/Mastercard in a decade or so.
And for the spammers: What matters for this is whether the recipient thought they opted in. No matter how clever you think you are by pre-checking that checkbox, or hiding it in the TOS, or putting the non-mandatory spam checkbox between two other clearly-mandatory checkboxes so people think it's mandatory: If the user didn't want the mails, they're going to mark your spam as spam and you'll have the deliverability problems that you deserve.
When it happens collectively e.g. through taxes, you get somewhat of a middle ground between the survey and giving your own money (directly and visibly).
There seems to be some kind of international target of 0.7% of GNI (~GDP) for developmental aid already, which governments often don't meet fully but come close to (e.g. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03...), so the 0.5% would probably be viable in tax form.
Regarding companies trying to block any contact with customer service and adding endless AI hurdles: In some countries, having a reachable means of contact is legally required. Is there a NOYB-style organization that specializes in enforcing this right (suing companies on behalf of consumers)?
For the "bureaucracy has royally fucked up and doesn't want to fix it", if it is something that can be fixed with money and isn't time sensitive (e.g. you need a refund rather than get the airline to actually provide you the ticket you already paid for and want to fly this weekend): In countries that have effective small claims courts, these can be a surprisingly convenient (less hassle than the "talk to the bot" wall of the company!) to resolve this kind of issue.
I hope that these resolution methods become more common - I think the tools to fight enshittification often already exist, we just don't use them enough. A welcome side effect would, of course, be that this would impose a real cost on the enshittifiers, creating an incentive to provide proper support.
> In countries that have effective small claims courts, these can be a surprisingly convenient (less hassle than the "talk to the bot" wall of the company!) to resolve this kind of issue.
Idk where we fall on the scale of “effectiveness” vs our peers, but I do read more people’s stories of Small Claims that are positive than negative. But I’ve never used this. I suspect it would be difficult to press a claim against a random large “company” just based on how slippery their identities even are. “Oh, Apple Inc. isn’t responsible for that, it’s a different subsidiary based in Ireland for tax reasons. Go serve them.” I think most people would have to be out more money (maybe more than the S.C. limit?) before being motivated to engage with the chronically overextended legal system, sadly.
Also, if the effective tools do exist, count on American companies using the American bribery-based political system to change the laws to dull those tools or to eliminate them.
Again, if you live in some consumer-friendly country good for you, I’m just saying how it plays out in this one society. I’ll stipulate that it’s all our fault blah blah blah.
Which, hilariously, means that under GDPR, you only need to contact the web site, and they have to go talk to their 1207 partners that value your privacy to fulfill your request (I'm sure that in practice they'll say "sorry it's all 'anonymous' so we can't" or "we can't be sure that it's you even though you provided the identifier from your cookies"). I'm really disappointed that NOYB hasn't started going after web sites like that - that's quickly put a damper on the whole web surveillance economy.
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