Comment by louthy
13 hours ago
> the consenst banner is required either way.
Consent is required. The banner is just one mechanism, but not required. A website could hold off on all tracking until a suitable point in the usage of the site (like creating a profile, for example) and ask at that point.
The banner is an artefact of the hostile way most sites choose to try and hoodwink the user into being monetised and ultimately to piss users off so much that they complain about the legislation rather than the lack of online privacy.
And there was an initiative to include tracking preferences in browser HTTP headers, which never made it, as it was quite obvious that this would lead to a lot of people opting out.
Better to just harass them into a habit of dismissing the banner.
Well DNT indeed did not made it, but there is global privacy control header that is nowadays required as explicit opt-out mechanism by CCPA and some other states legislation. I always implement support for GPC in my products.
Never seen this offered to be set by any browsers, though.
7 replies →
There is also https://killthecookiebanner.eu/
if you write to your reps, they might just change that. The Eu is one of the few democracies left. Slow but powered by the people
I dunno man, from an outsider's perspective I used to think that but it seems to slowly be getting worse with trying to shove through internet surveillance and corporate protectionism under the guise of "protect the kids". I guess sadly someone saw how unreasonably effective that can be in the US.
When there is "legitimate purpose" there isn't reason to as soon items are put in the shopping cart this has to be tracked (be it session in url, cookie, local storage, ...) and no consent is needed.
The exact definition of "legitimate purpose" is unspecific (which is important to be able to adapt to development of new services) which leads to some lawyers being careful.
I also claim that some lobby groups promote having too many and too big consent banners to move blame from tracking companies to the EU ("stupid EU forcing all those banners!") in order to reverse the policy on tracking, which seems to have some effect.
Legitimate interest definition is pretty narrowly scoped. Most of the sneakiness relies on nobody checking or enforcing it.
You are confusing GDPR and ePD. Legitimate interest is GDPR legal basis for processing personal data (it has it's own requirements). ePD triggers when you read/store e.g. browser data and make it available via network. Consent is the primary ePD legal basis and the exception related to that is much narrower (strictly necessary for ISS provider to provide service requested by user).
Generally speaking JS code that makes request to server is covered by ePD while actually processing that request server side is covered by GDPR (there are some nuances to this).
I know it's tempting to put this consent-banner anti-pattern all on toxic ad-driven platforms, because their motives are bad.
The problem with this view, though, is that even the very agencies propagating these rules do the exact same thing! You can go to any site from an EU arm and get the same banners.
At this point, you can't really blame it on bad-faith actors, you have to accept that it's a bad rule. Which is not to say I know a better one!