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Comment by CamouflagedKiwi

2 days ago

Blaming the industry for it doesn't change the reality that the law has done very little to improve the thing it was aimed at and made the internet worse for users (and developers) with all the banners. By any objective measure its outcomes are terrible - lawmakers should do better than just throwing out things like that.

> By any objective measure

Number of sites using google analytics on my browsing session with my consent has gone down

Very little? The norm used be to slap google analytics on everything. Suddenly everybody thinks about compliance — especially those who didn't even have idea there was something wrong.

Many sites ditched tracking altogether so they don't have to have banners. Everybody is aware of GDPR so you can be pretty confident that when european site has no banner it doesn't track you.

Could the law be better? Sure I would love to ban tracking altogether. But this was lobbied to hell by AD companies. Everybody was kicking and screaming because they want all the data. And we still got something that helps. That is a win.

And you can see how industry hates it in way they implement the banners. It is annoying and confusing on purpose. You could comply in nice way but when you need to share the data with your 141 ad partners and each one gets their own checkbox… good luck.

Same reason nobody was respecting the dont track me flag. The industry is absolutely and exclusively to blame here.

  • The law has wasted billions of hours of human life and productivity. Was it worth it?

    • Law was created as response to advertisers invading privacy, are you arguing that unchecked invasion of your privacy is worth it? If anything unchecked invasion of privacy wasted all of those hours plus hours of work of lawmakers plus hours of work while implementing all that advertising in the first place…