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European Union set to revise cookie law, admits cookie banners are annoying
(www.techspot.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Not only are they annoying, they go half way to legitimising the theft of user data.
Exactly. Identify what uses are legitimate and what uses aren't, and legislate directly. None of this consumer consent crap because it's meaningless to consumers. No consumer benefits from their browsing habits being under surveillance.
Was done before too, but now the websites simply need a banner for using categories of cookies which require it (tracking, marketing, ..)
And we already have GDPR at least limiting activities in a broad sense. (of course lots of leeway, but still much better than before)
You cannot do more with a cookie banner you couldnt already do before.
What do you mean? GDPR allowed for the "unless the visitor agrees" stuff so that's why we see cookie banners everywhere.
I would say it should either be allowed or not, depending on the use case. A navigation app should be able to track your location for the service they provide but not for ads or selling to other companies. Your calculator app has no business even asking. Profile based advertising (rather than content based) should be banned wholesale. That sort of stuff
You do realize you only see the cookie banners because the companies are now forced to show you one? It's not like they started collecting shit only after the GDPR nor is it entirely illegal and unethical to sell user data. The point of the GDPR was to make users aware of which websites are selling which data and give them an avenue (be that declining cookies or leaving the site) to prevent that. Corporations then designed their way around the wording of the GDPR to make declining cookies as difficult as possible which is why we're seeing this push for a revision now. The goal still isn't to make user data based financing impossible, it still is to prevent users from being pushed or bullied into selling their user data against their will.
That should be the goal. This cannot be left to individual consumer choice, is what I'm saying. The annoying cookie banners should be a wake-up call for regulators that the "let the consumers decide" experiment has failed.
The cookie banner is only required to store data on the users device. the tracking without is still possible and potentially allowed via legitimate interest.
If they want more they already ask for more outside the cookie banners when they require or want to have your consent (e.g. consent to load content from sources which will transfer your data outside their control e.g. youtube-embedings)
The limitations of whats allowed is already established in the GDPR, so anything you cannot find legitimate reasons for is already not allowed e.g. simply selling your data to other companies (as long as they include PII)
And as coupling is not allowed either its not allowed to couple consent with a cookie banner (which should only be used to ask for permission to store data for purposes which arent required for the usage).
What we do need is to have a technical implementation of the browser to tell the website via standardized methods what is allowed or not.