Comment by pjmlp

People don't really use SMS in Europe, do they? WhatsApp spam is very pervasive, though.

In certain civil law systems such as Turkey, the process is still king, in fact more important than in the US because of the preponderance of positive law in civil law.

The standard "Accept Cookies" banner is, give or take, malicious compliance to the EU's cookie laws. For actually required things, it doesn't *need* to be a banner. Companies tend to use a standardized, third-party-powered "follow the EU law" tool that they get the ugly cookie banner. And even that banner's malicious compliance is under attack now because it takes too many steps to opt out.

For things like sign-in, you barely have to mention the use of cookies on your website, because it's necessary. For things like items in an anonymous shopping cart, a simple "adding this item to the cart when you're not logged in will cause the item to be saved in a cookie so we can remember it later" would suffice.

I'm not a lawyer, but that's my understanding.

The cookie banner pop-ups are not compliance with the EU legislation, in fact, many of them are in direct violation of EU laws. If you were to give sites the benefit of doubt, they are doing it because they are copy pasting, but the reality is, that the law is that they can not track you without your concent and that they are not allowed to bother you. The fact that they do is likely malicious compliance to get you to blame the EU rather than their shitty tracking practices.

Any site that doesn't have a single button click to ignore all cookies, breaks EU law. But to truly follow the law, you would have to go into a site setting on your own, and enable tracking. Which nobody would do.

The alternative would have been banning tracking and I don't think that would have happend. At least now you're being informed and have at least the perception of an option to opt-out.

Had you truly preferred not being informed, not being allowed to opt-out?

This is a persistent stupid take but many HN readers are also on the wrong side of the consumer protection. Those startups don't make money out of thin air eh?

Once again. The full consumer protection would be banning behavior-based advertisement completely, which I would welcome. GDPR is striking a balance. It forces the companies to ask if they are going to collect data and use it in any other purpose from delivering the information / service.

Almost all of the web is feeding data into Google's ad and statistics services which are used to profile people and completely out of scope. That's the minimum. Worser services feed your data into every single PII broker. If you don't collect such data, no banners are necessary. If you need an address and an email to just ship a product, you need 0 cookie banners. The websites can also do geo-fencing so you don't see any banners. They don't want to spend any money to engineers though.

But no, it is EU's fault to create a balanced law. Companies should be violating you and your pricacy left and right. That's their right, isn't it.

If the FTC can’t do what the FTC is supposed to do, then that is the FTC’s fault for continuing to exist. It’s unfit for purpose and should be shut down.

> DPAs (especially the Irish one) are unfortunately known to be incredibly business friendly

Can you give me some examples of this please?

I think that the core problem for the Irish DPA is that they are woefully under-resourced, and they're up against the biggest companies in the world. Now, one could argue that this is the fault of the government/people and I'd agree with you, but that's a harder thing to change (Ireland was basically the only country that didn't throw their government out post the massive Covid/Ukraine inflation spike).

And it can get worse. Over shooting right (left) invariably leads to overshoot left (right) which we absolutely do not need either.

The American sense (when we get off our butts and do it) is common sense, slowly changing law that always apportions control in equal parts to accountability.

It's the last part that is more galling (because increasingly we've failed) and ultimately will be the more decisive in any future inflection point.

Did you read TFA? This had nothing to do with neoliberalism or whatever.

Everyone agreed with the spirit of the rule, even the two republican appointees who voted against it.

They voted against it because the FTC cheated and broke their own rule making process, they believed it would be struck down by the courts because of this.

They were right. The courts sympathized with the rule, but held that the FTC cheated it's process, and that if left unchecked it could create a tyrannical FTC issuing rules at their whim, ignoring the true economic impact of their rule.

All this court ruling said is that the FTC needs to follow the law and their own defined process for rule making.

They are free to implement this rule, they just need to do it the right way.

While we may not be happy with the short term effect, this was a good ruling. The FTC will go back and do this properly, and hopefully next time will follow the law when making rules.

I don't see the neoliberal deregulation you're talking about, so I'll bite.

Regulatory capture I have seen too often e.g. net neutrality getting killed by a Verizon cronie masquerading as a public servant in the FCC. However, from my perspective, it's been mostly conservative powers undoing consumer protections. Unless you mean liberalism in the more European sense, in which case I agree.

>True but generally speaking American companies usually have much better customer service and better refund policies than European ones. The issues usually stem when a company corners the market or has no viable alternatives.

this does not track with my experience

In Germany companies have to have 14 days, no questions asked return for products and services ordered online. If they don't accept it, you can report to a consumer protection agency and sue the company.

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