HN user
The GDPR obliges all companies to provide an option for users to receive all data held on them; takeout and FB'd equivalent were implemented in response to that.
For all other companies, at least if you are in the EU, you should he able to request the data by eg email and they are obliged to send it. You just don't know what format you'll get.
Another view might be that this means you are investing in the community behind it and some of the leading people who hopefully will help to ensure that the project lives on.
Original report and PR:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...
Yes I absolutely agree it can be useful.anf satisfying to see analytics. But it also means you send your users' data to another place where you know it will be recycled etc.
There are alternatives but as you say sadly none are as easy - probably because none have as much budget behind them. I see a number of comparison articles for gdpr compliant analytics, so it seems to have become its own market of sorts.
I have opted myself out of most Google services due to the intrusive nature, I wouldn't want to impose it on my site visitors (but I also have no need to monetize, so maybe a different ballpark).
Technically necessary cookies are fine. If those go beyond that it would be against the law... If you're in the EU.
But it's not cookie consent, it's tracking consent.
It's not just cookies though, it's tracking in general which you should also be able to turn off (but impossible at browser level).
The law is not about cookies, it's about an obligation to inform on and let users opt out of tracking features that go beyond technically necessary features.
They are not mandatory, it's a choice by the site owner to include them. They are only mandatory if you include tracking features that track users across the web (= ads and Google analytics).
Most of Europeans do. You might not care in the moment but you will care if you know how these profiles are used, sold and resold, ...
Gdpr does not force the banners. It forces to ask for consent before tracking users across sites. This doesn't have to be a banner and it doesn't have to be if you only use technical cookies (login, session, ..)
You only need consent if you include Google analytics or ads or a similar platform. Those platforms push the banners on people, pretending that those are needed.
The reason you see the banners everywhere is that a huge number of sites integrate these spy services.
Not because of the law but because those pushing tracking and designing the banners intentionally make them intrusjve. Purely technical cookies (eg login, spam protection) don't need a consent by the user.
No website needs GA. You choose to have it for whatever reason but there's not ever a need to use GA. There are many less intrusive ways to father statistics than to sell your users to Google.
Technical cookies don't need consent.
How many sites have seriously thought about reducing Google analytics and intrusive ads? If it's even 1% then the banners unequivocally HAVE made the web better.
Giving you the right to get a copy of data held by Facebook & co!
Eu lawmaking in a nutshell:
Commission (leaders of which are selected by your government that you presumably voted for) makes a draft.
Commission consults widely (usually online consultation) and all national ministries comment.
Commission redrafts and sends to parliament and council.
In the council your government has (most of the time) veto power.
In the parliament your and other countries delegates vote on it.
Then parliament (people's representatives) and council (national government representatives) sit together, find the middle ground of a final draft.
Parliament and council then each do a final vote.
Depending on the exact type of legal document it either enters into force right away or your national administration, parliament and government create their own national version of it conform to the EU document and make that a national law.
That's a pretty heavy process but it's just wrong to say that the voters don't have influence. National governments and delegates both can say no.
Now is the parliament representative just because people are not from just one country? Is your national parliament representative even if there are people from different regions/cities/...? Is your major democratically elected just because that other suburb also got to vote? That's just an absurd position.
For login, payment etc you would have "technical" cookies, the ones essential to run the site. They don't need a consent.
Why add GA then? It's user hostile and there are better and more compliant ways to track basic analytics.
Most websites wouldn't need them to begin with (except to use Google analytics and ads).
You can do basic user statistics without active tracking and for technical cookies the banners (nor any other form of consents) is necessary.
The ad industry (Google & co) have pushed these user-hostile banners, it's not a feature of the law.
The legislation was long overdue. It's a bit more complex than it ought to be but the intentions are just fine. The issue is that there's a huge number of organisations that prefer not to comply or have every intention to make things intrusive and annoying so that people click "accept" to make it go away.
Google inserts many of those banners due to google analytics or ads being used. Their main intention is to gather more user data and make users provide data. This is NOT a 1:1 match with what site owners will want - which is to have users and some basic analytics.
The cookie banners are hostile and intrusive because they are designed to be so. The hope is that users are trained to click 'yes' to get rid of the annoyance.
The GDPR explicitly states that technical cookies are fine, so most sites wouldn't need any banner except for using google analytics & ads. So use a different analytics and you don't need a banner.
It's not the law, it's the implementation and the oligopoly of and companies pushing this implementation.
This 100x.
Provider that gives me 1-5 check marks to make once (and where the default settings are "off"?) - trustworthy. Anything like Verizon properties which gives an intentionally bad UX with thousands of clicks, information overload, dark patterns where 'accept' = 'accept all' even when you unchecked some boxes.. all this tells me I don't want to support this site.
And gdpr does much more, I don't think Google and Facebook exports used to really be possible so easily.
I don't click every consent banner and you also shouldn't. You'd be surprised how many accept a No just fine, which is the intended use.
That's not the law, that's the implementation that's the issue. The same EU body quoted above has passed the message for a long time that that's not needed eg for purely technical cookies.
What's not conform? That's a language selection screen, not a cookie screen. In the banner at the top you can click "decline".
Love that idea. We definitely want to ...
Hi Shaun, I appreciate the you take the time and respond to everyone here, but it's all "thank you I love the idea" with rather platitude answers (plenty of chrome extensions do not take privacy seriously..). It sounds like an interesting premise but so far there's no info on what toucan does. Could you try to explain a bit some of the basic questions people have here?
E.g.
- what exactly am I learning? Can you give an example? Is it just factoids? - how does toucan work? What are the sources of learning content? - is there any pedagogy or methodology apart from showing relevant info next to sites I'm looking at? - what is your business model? Ads mixed in with the learning content? A banner ad related to the content? Selling usage statistics? Scraping websites for a search engine? ...? Clarifying this would also clarify... - why should I trust you with my browsing data?
Good luck in any case - but a bit more info would be appreciated :-)
Juul is owned by big tobacco (Philip Morris).
I would hope that any gun shop that sells products with the slogan "you can murder your spouse or neighbour with them, but you can also shoot animals or walls I guess".gets shut down ;)
Maybe their first aim is also to make it less accessible and reduce its use.
You can still sue the developers to pieces even if the project lives on.