From time to time, important news gets overshadowed by other headlines, even though it could have a profound impact on our (online) world. To most of us, few things are more bothersome than the dreaded cookie banners. On countless websites, you’re confronted with a pesky pop-up urging you to agree to something. You end up consenting without really knowing what it is. If you try to figure out what’s going on, you quickly get lost among the often hundreds of “partners” who want access to your personal data. Even if you do give your consent, it’s questionable whether you truly understand what you’re agreeing to.
This needs to be worldwide.
And… PURGE ALL USER INFORMATION!
I don’t care for those ‘but what about those people planning/planned crimes?’ The one thing I learned from the current Trump administration is that the information is so fucking ripe for abuse AND they don’t even catch enough actual crooks that letting a few legit bad people slip through isn’t going to bother me.
Cookies are old news. What about browser fingerprinting which can track you across websites? https://www.amiunique.org/
There’s basically no easy way to safeguard against it without making browsing nearly unusable.
Yes! You are unique among the 3874720 fingerprints in our entire dataset.
If the website says that I’m unique in green font, it’s actually bad and should be red, isn’t it ?
Yes.
Happened to me, too. Fuck!
GDPR is regarding personal data, which includes cookies as well as any other fingerprinting. Even though browser fingerprinting does not persist any data on a device itself, explicit consent must be gathered before it’s used for processing (i.e. tracking) purposes.
But why unusable, why does a browser have to leak language, window size, time, extensions? Can’t those be spoofed?
A lot of those things are also required to render a webpage correctly.
But isn’t most of that client-side processing? Can’t I request a vanilla generic page and once it is in my browser to process it to shape it into the window size and extensions I want? Even if it is an adblocker: serve me the ad, I’ll block it internally. But I suppose that for dynamic pages with js requests this would become hard to do.
Yeah it’s Javascript that’s the issue that can just take all this data in the client and send it wherever. And that’s exactly what’s happening.
What’s the solution?
I’m not sure a technical solution is feasible, other than dns-blocking these trackers. I suppose lawmakers need to spring into action to make this shit illegal.
You could probably set a cap on how many different fingerprinty attributes a script is allowed to grab before requesting permission from the user.
That is indeed the solution.
A technical solution won’t cut it. Here’s a very convoluted example: the <p> tag allows you to send the text “buy illegal drugs here” to kids!! Omg!!! What to do? Remove the <p> tag? Obviously not. You ban the practice.
You will have your tor-connected 1024x768 anonymous window and you will like it!
tor-connected
You are unique!
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Tor Browser in normal mode is quite usable though, you just can’t use extensions and you need to start a new session whenever you use other websites so they can’t track you via cookies. Mullvad Browser is quite similar too.
oh fuck i’m unique on every browser 😨
wow i didn’t know belgium was based. I guess i was wrong when i thought they peaked with french fries
Also first in Europe to ban lootboxes as gambling, iirc.
Idk, their waffles and chocolates are pretty good too.
And beer
Belgian craft beers are top notch.
Delirium Tremens at -12 Celsius 😍
still pretty tough to beat the fries. I’d say this is a close second.
It’s a fairytale town, isn’t it? How’s a fairytale town not somebody’s fucking thing?How can all those canals and bridges and cobbled streets and those churches, all that beautiful fucking fairytale stuff, how can that not be somebody’s fucking thing, eh?
Wait, wait. Better quote.
What’s Belgium famous for? Chocolates and child abuse, and they only invented the chocolates to get to the kids.
Love the sentiment, curious about implementation.
This is a win for everyone in Europe, and possibly beyond. [Emphasis mine.] Companies may no longer secretly track your behavior based on “consent” given under pressure. Hopefully, this will not only put an end to these dubious practices, but also to those pesky cookie banners.
But we’re not there yet. Regulators have ruled the system illegal, and the court’s ruling has now confirmed it. Still, the companies making billions from this model won’t stop on their own. That’s why European regulators must now truly step up: enforce the law and make sure these companies actually comply.
Regulators try not to get compromised by lobbyists when billions of dollars are at stake.
I sincerely wish you good luck.
Big corpos aren’t going to comply and pay a small fine instead. https://proton.me/tech-fines-tracker
We need the corporate death penalty.
Or at least take 100% of their revenue (not profit) until they comply.
I’m sorry but my dream has always been becoming a corrupt politician
Even if idiots with enough money stay unleashed this is great news. One step at a time. Thanks for sharing!
Random side note: how is Belgium to live in and what would it look like to live there right now? Asking for a friend.
Edit: thanks for al the information. I’ll move onto learning more about the country and it’s people’s history.
We have better access to healthcare than France, generally good work-life balance, access to education is cheap (1000 eur for one year at a good university ). People are welcoming but also reserved. It’s raining a lot and we spend a lot of time complaining about it.
I have friends who live there, and they report the same. They visited us for the first time here in London recently, and were quite shocked by the stark differences.
It’s raining a lot and we spend a lot of time complaining about it.
Hey, that’s our brand!
Sincerely, a dude from Hamburg
how is Belgium to live in and what would it look like to live there right now?
It’s literally between France, Germany and the Netherlands, I mean geographically yes but roughly culturally too. Arguably Brussels is a mix of all that and other cities again match where they are.
So… it’s a Western European country with good quality of life
despitethanks to having one of the very highest taxes rate. You don’t have to be a socialist to be here but if you want to become a rich entrepreneur it’s going to be challenging.Source : immigrated there from France ~10 years ago.
Edit: s/despite/thanks to/
it’s a Western European country with good quality of life despite having one of the very highest taxes rate.
“Despite”? Try, “because”
I think they’re actually right about this one, taxes tend to cover things that give you high standard of living more than quality of life.
Curious what the distinction between “standard of living” and “quality of life” here is… I’m sure there are subtle differences, but surely taxes contribute to both (which themselves are interrelated).
Actually they’re very well defined economic terms. Standard of living measures how well your basic needs as a member of a given society are filled by that sociey. Quality of life measures how nice your shit is.
Pretty simple.
So yes, taxes effect both, but standard of living more directly.
You’re right obviously, you dirty communist! /$
Post updated accordingly.
I think you can reap the benefits from just using a VPN and set the country to Belgium?
Depends on how many sites comply, most will likely block Belgian IP’s due to this.
Huh, according to the logs, the population of Belgium increased by ~10x, and most people seem to be moving to this area with loss lots of data centers. Checks out.
Expensive and gray.
Going down with the rest of Europe economically
Yeah I’ll need the detailed judgment of this one before considering it a massive win. Consent has always been something that needs to be done willingly and freely. The issue is forcing the whole industry to give a shit about the principle. Maybe IAB will have to shift its practices but I haven’t had any panicked calls yet so I assume this isn’t systemic.
but but but how are the corporations supposed to make money off of our data if they can’t harvest it? Think of the poor corporations!!
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And then the EU introduces the worst spying law in history.
Phew!
Based
Someone from a developing nation told me that hating advertising is absolutely a luxury of only wealthy nations. Without ad supported formats LATAM, EMEA, and APAC would have far less access to entertainment and information. It made me reexamine how much of my thoughts on this are privileged.
It’s not about advertising. It’s about spying on our online lives. Not the same thing.
Yeah but that’s not what I was talking about. I too do all the necessary fiddling to try and reduce the amount of fingerprinting an advertiser can do to me. That said, I’m a social butterfly so I have every kind of major social media and chat app because I have to.
Then what are you talking about? I didn’t downvote your post, but probably like people who did, I have trouble understanding your point. Everyone online - privileged and underprivileged alike - is under omnipresent surveillance of countless actors. Until very recently this was completely unregulated. Information about our behavior, interests, opinions, relations, health, anxieties and dumb shit we post in moments of confusion, is gathered, sold, recombined and resold. The rich and powerful are doing it in hope of gaining ability to predict and change our behavior - i.e. gain more power over us. So just because you are more privileged then some, you should not care? Or not appreciate that something good, even if small and insufficient, happened about this awful situation?
As if there’s no other way.
This sounds like a far-fetched excuse, advertising is ugly, obnoxious and poisonous.
It has zero qualities.At the moment there’s no other way that makes sense for the companies looking at these regions. The reality is that the infrastructure to deliver digital goods is that it costs the same no matter where you’re delivering those goods to. So if people in that region have such a weak currency, they’re paying you one 100 th of what say France is paying for something then offering the service to them maybe an unprofitable venture overall. That said, I’m not a businessman because I fucking hate this kind of shit, but the guy’s comment really made me stop and observe my own bias.
You already get the benefit of lower prices for digital products that have the same production cost regarless of where it is sold. I understand that your wages are lower, but I can not like paying a lot more for the same services/
Generally, you wouldn’t see things like Netflix and HBO enter Latin America without ad supported versions.
I’m not a fan of being tracked so don’t get me wrong, but without the money earned with advertising the Internet will look very different and not only in a good way.
I disagree. The online advertising industry needs to shrink, and we should probably break up the monopolies.
Look at this chart:
Growth of advertising correlates with enshittification.
I 100% agree and totally get why I am being downvoted, but just disabling advertising or banning tracking cookies are not a magic fix to save the internet from the perspective of the companies that now show these ads. But I am definitely I favour of changes, the enshittication went way to far already. But there is more than big social media platforms is what I mean to say.
I agree with that!
Advertising should be illegal.
The world would be a better place without it.
Ding ding ding
Advertising has funded many things yet hasn’t made anything better, ever.
Demonstrably incorrect. Advertising is responsible for many, many fantastic free services. Without it they wouldn’t be free or wouldn’t exist.
A lot of advertising is annoying and misleading, even good advertising can lead to people buying stuff they don’t need. I am definitely not pro-advertising but it does serve more than monopolistic capitalism, especially on a more local level.
Advertising predates tracking by millennia. We can have online advertising without tracking, and certainly without this orgy of sharing data between 4353 partners. But market alone won’t get us there, because whoever offers advertising without tracking and selling data will be at a huge disadvantage compared to the crooks who sell. Only regulatory action can help. So this small step should be celebrated.
