They tried
EDIT: I didn't realize the anger this would bring out of people. It was supposed to be a funny meme based on recent real-life situations I've encountered, not an attack on the EU.
I appreciate the effort of the EU cookie laws. The practice of them just doesn't live up to the theory of the law. Shady companies are always going to find a way to be shady.
Any website that does that I just close the tab.
You should travel to Europe sometime and try to use the web
Yeah, it is great here.
Either the website is great and doesn't ask anything.
Or it asks for cookie consent, which you can decline in 1 click.
Or it pulls one of those "break the website" tricks which will get them sued sooner or later.
Or they block access to EU members, at which point you know they only exist to extract your data anyway.
I also live in Europe and almost all websites display a dialog that asks you to choose cookie preferences. However, it seems that some few websites, mostly german (spiegel.de, gutefrage) that give you the opetion to browse with ads and cookies or pay. I do not use those websites and I imagine it is not legal.
I'm working hard to make sure all websites do that.
You will be internet free in 5 years. Yes, I wear a cape
I refuse to go to sites that do this, I also refuse to go to sites that block adblock...and specially the sites that detect and block private browsing, that one shouldn't even be a thing
I don't use adblock, and yet i keep getting "disable adblock to view this" messages, fuck this shit
Why the fuck would they prevent private browsing? I use that a lot to be sure the session is closed correctly.
There's lots of newspaper sites in the US, that do this. They'll be like "wanna use private browsing, make an account, or go visit from normal browsing." Idk why they do it but they do. Apparently there are discrepancies in the way browsers handle persistent storage features between private and non-private browsing that allow for detection
Cause they can't track your browser history that way.
Cool. One less website to visit. Not like there is a shortage.
I love when the trash takes itself out
I'm pretty sure breaking your website with no cookies is against the rules, actually. It's either serve the EU with GDPR-compliance or GTFO entirely.
Yeah, you could still just break the law, but as usual there's a cost to that one way or the other.
this. and honestly I wish more websites followed the "serve under gdpr or don't have a European marker". A random blog once wasn't available in the EU because of GDPR. And you know what? It's better than them violating GDPR and the EU doing nothing.
Tons of companies break the cookie law already, but enforcement seems to be rare
Doesn't enforcement work by letting competitors sue you if you don't follow the rules for these things?
What's the cookie law?
I've heard stories about some of the big guys getting hit with sizable GDPR fines. I don't really know the full extent of what they do but I do imagine there's someone that makes it their job to prosecute GDPR violations.
It's more about the big boys. If they act in a way that breaks the GDPR, now the EU has a stick to hit them with.
Your meme is funny, but people genuinely use these arguments to be against sensible EU laws, hence the response I imagine.
Yeah being unable to open… checks notes local news websites from the US has been a real deal breaker
Sometimes its relieving when you go to do something and you find out that you have already finished, lol.
I have run into this recently on several non-US, non-news sites. I have actually never run into it on US local news sites, so I don't know what you're on about.
Yeah it’s a tragedy
In my experience it seems to be medical websites and recipe websites
Frankly I wish I could fit more US politics into my life, so it's been hard, I tells ya.
Then you've picked the right place my friend!
That's gotta be quite some website you visited, if it didn't load at all without cookies. As someone from Germany, who mostly rejects every sites cookies, except for the essential ones most of the time, but sometimes outright rejects all cookies, I've never encountered a website that refused to load upon doing that.
Not defending any webpages that do do that, just contributing my personal experience.
Also: this for chrome or this for fiefrerfx
Also from Germany. Some american news and media sites do that.
I've seen Italian sites that will put up a pay wall if you refuse the cookies.
All don't offer cookie rejection.
Makes sense, I don't use any of them, at all. I'm pretty sure there's a place where you can report such webpages for doing that though, though I don't know where at the moment.
Edit: possibly this one
Don't know if it's me or what, but I clicked on the first link and when it opened in my mobile browser, everything started shaking vertically like the page was suffering an earthquake. I'll definitely have to look into that because I've never seen it happen before on any website like it.
some other just block access from the eu completely. (not a news site, but applebee's does this)
Consent-o-matic is magnificent.
One extension to automatically accept, one extension to automatically delete everything after the tab is closed.
It's rare to see (probably since someone pointed out it doesn't conform to GDPR standards), but I ran into a batch of them in short order recently, so it's been on my mind.
I exit in the EU a lot. Same, they mostly work fine with no cookies. It's much more common to see one that just doesn't let EU residents in.
https://www.healthline.com/ - has a two-click "disable all", but if you choose it you get a static site with 10 of their articles https://anon.healthline.com/
That's fine. People who don't care about cookies will accept them anyway and those who do care about cookies will know not to visit that site anymore.
I feel like people would have responded to this meme better if you didn't depict the European Union as an NPC
Especially compared to some scummy corps.
They're the ones who made the law. Who else should have been in the meme?
People complaining about the cookie law don't understand the issue.
The law doesn't state that websites have to show a cookie banner. It states that if a website wants to track you with cookies, they have to ask permission.
You can get websites (like lemmy and wikipedia) that don't ask for cookies, because none of them try to track you.
So if a websites demands cookies or they don't allow access, it is a clear sign that the website only cares about your visit if they can invade your privacy for profit.
Meaning it will just be a dumb clickbait website with no decent content anyway, that you should just skip.
The businesses who are actually doing this shit and not the people actually trying to solve issues in the world lmfao.
So far I’ve only seen small US newspaper who did this. Is anyone angry about this?
There's a medical website that appears in top searches (forget the name) that does it too but yeah, mostly seems to be news websites but not the big ones. In most cases Unlock Origin or the like can hide the panel they throw up to choose if you really need the info or archive or 12ft ladder can get you the info.
I just happened to run into a few recently. Just venting some frustration.
https://www.tagesspiegel.de has no option to disable cookies without a subscription from contentpass. I think it's contentpass's business model.
Serious question: I know that there are tracking cookies and the user should be able to decline those,but most sites have an auth cookie that stores you're credentials. The devs can store it in a different place like local storage but thats really unsecured.what can the devs do in this situation when the user decline all cookies?
The EU is not stupid. They categorized cookies into the necessary ones for site-usage and those that aren't. So developers just categorize their session cookie (rightfully) as necessary and that's it.
Usually the prompts are specifically for tracking cookies, not essential ones for login. Alternatives without cookies:
The GDPR is not "cookie law", it only prohibits tracking users in a way not essential to the operation of the site using locally stored identifiers (cookies, local storage, indexed DB...)
Storing a cookie to track login sessions, or color scheme preference does not require asking the user or allowing them to decline.
What the dev can do if user decline processing of personal data is not store such personal data in cookies or anywhere.
Or even better, do not track the user so the consent would only be needed in for example registration form.
I generally agree with the statment under that image and it's certainly a funny meme but also Illegal, sadly the enforcment is a joke but that's not really the laws fault!
Nearly all of these are illegal, but sadly there is little enforcement when it comes to this. (Tracking must be opt-in, not opt-out. Ignoring a banner must be interpreted as declining. Opting out must be a simple option, not navigating a complex and misleading menus. The users choice applies to any form of tracking, not just cookies...)
That's literally the point though...
No? If a website refuses to load because you refused tracking cookies, it’s still illegal under GDPR
The second that popup about cookies shows up I immediately backout and not use the site.
That's like every site. How do you use the internet at all?
It's becoming a lot easier to use the internet a lot less. It's been turned into such a user-hostile space so domineered by corporations and fascists that most of the internet doesn't really hold much of an appeal anymore, at least for me.
If the internet died tomorrow and didn't come back, I'd be annoyed about not being able to use it to order food, manage my bank account, or watch shows/movies, but the world would likely be an overall better place once logistics re-adapted to not having it.
The internet was cool for the first 10-15 years, but it's been a rapidly worsening cesspit for a long time. Nothing the internet can offer us is worth also tolerating it as a tool for inescapable government and corporate surveillance, and as the most effective imagineable breeding ground for fascism and disinformation.
The internet makes our lives worse in so many more ways than it imporves them, and people are too fucking addicted to it to give a shit.
If you really don't want to bother, you can use the consent-o-matic addon for Firefox that automatically declines every cookie possible.
dumbest shit ever
Not at all my experience, but ok.
Clear sign that the only reason that website exist is to extract your privacy for profit.
Just move on to the billion other websites that don't try to violate you.
I don't give a shit about cookies my browser just cleans after me and next time i open it everything is like new.
Shrewd businessmen: 1
tyrannical big government: 0
Road to hell, good intentions and all that. Government fundamentally misunderstanding the role of cookies and the fact that browsers can handle user privacy with trivial effort by default rather than having every single website annoy the fuck out of you with a million goddamn notifications before actually showing you what you want to see.
The annoying popups are an act of malicious compliance from data harvesting companies. The tracking industry wants people to associate the right to privacy with stupid annoyance, so that people will stop demanding privacy.
The legislation does not say anything about cookies. It's about rights and responsibilities in data collection (no matter how it's done technically). The "consent" part of it exists as a compromise, because there has been heavy lobbying against the legislation.
This is not a technical problem — we've had many technologies for it, and the industry has sabotaged all of them. There was the P3P spec in 2002! It has been implemented in IE that had 90%+ market share back then. And Google has been actively exploiting a loophole in IE's implementation to bypass it and have unlimited tracking. Google has paid fines for actively subverting Safari's early anti-tracking measures. Then browsers tried DNT spec as the simplest possible opt-out, and even that has been totally rejected by the data harvesting industry. There are easy technical solutions, but there are also literally trillions of dollars at stake, and ad companies will viciously sabotage all of it.
Well said, appreciate the write up ☺️
Like I care. I've got a plugin that automatically accepts all cookies, and another one that deletes cookies when I leave the page.
By accepting everything, you are also sending most of the time extra data to third parties. What you are doing is ill-advised if you care about privacy.
Not really. If you're using an adblocker, it's the best option. It's the path of least resistance, and tracking is blocked regardless if it's tracked it not. No server will see if you pressed accept or decline. That's why this addon exists.
How does that work though? The cookies are presumably based on things like your IP and browser metrics, which a site gets from your browser. If your browser throws away the cookies then on your next visit you aren't volunteering that you've been there before. But the site can still likely figure it out, but without the cookies it isn't as certain. With well-constructed cookies they can be almost 100% sure you're the same visitor.
Wait doesn't it automatically deny them?
The "I still don't care about Cookies" extension does not, no.
This extension can do that: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/
However, since many webpages have illegally made it so refusing consent is more difficult than giving 'consent', that extension is significantly more complex and in my experience doesn't work as reliably, unfortunately.
The above is wrong, the add on attempts to hide the prompt. It doesn't accept nor reject it.
Better to use consent-o-matic, which blocks all possible cookies instead of accepting them.
The websites still work perfectly anyway, it only preserves your privacy.
IIRC the EU also ruled that burying the rejection options under additional links counts as a violation. Hence why Google now has a Reject button next to the accept button. Most sites still do that.
Do you know if there is a EU-wide place to report such behavior?
The biggest privately owned TV channel in my country not only does that, but actually just redirects you to a pdf file if you want to "manage cookies". And it's not like I can submit a complaint on a national level, as the ruling party's website uses google analytics without a cookie notice at all.
Most sites definitely don't do this
They're still widely used for some (illegal) reason
Because they rest safe in the knowledge that you rarely if ever get taken to court for it. There are millions of web pages, it needs people to take action to do something about it, and just clicking "Yes all of them" to access the content you were just trying to get to is a far better solution in most situations than hiring a lawyer and investing a few years of legal proceedings, nevermind the money.
even worse offenders are the ones with tick boxes for "Legitimate Interest", since legitimate interest is another grounds for processing (just ads freely given consent is one), the fact you got a "tick" box for it makes it NOT legitimate interest within the confines of the GDPR.
it also doesn't matter what technology you use whether its cookies / urls / images / local storage / spy satellites. its solely about how you use the data..
why are the EU the only people that bother to actually govern in a modern and helpful way
But what are they going to do about it?
"Here's a fine, if you don't pay it your site can no longer operate in the EU"
"... ok"
The EU is an important market for many websites, so yeah, that is usually what happens.
Those pages can just fuck off. There are many more pages.
Of course that's just my opinion.
They found a way around: accept all cookies or pay 2€/months. And it was decied legal by GDPR authorities
Some national authorities allow it, most don't. The final word will be from the CJEU or the EDPB.
Then half the web violates it or there is One Pixel button that closes the damn popup.