This just doesn't make sense. EU regulations are already making progress in improving online privacy: (a) No cookie banner required for functionally necessary cookies, (b) there needs to be an option to refuse tracking cookies in the cookie banner, (c) the dreaded cookie banner appears only the first time you visit a site.
I would say, we are like 80% there. Yes, there are still some dark patterns employed by cookie banners, trying to trick you into accepting tracking. But they are not too hard to make out. And they can be fixed by tuning the regulation a bit: Require the opt-out to be the first choice and the only one with highlighting.
Ad tracking is not going away tomorrow. If we ever are going to get rid of it, we first need legislation to defang it so it stops being a cash-cow. "Tracking prohibited by default" is a great end-goal, but we are not there yet.
Reading between the lines, it appears that there is some new solution proposed to "automatically communicate your privacy preference". That's nice, but when e.g. the Do Not Track header was tried, it just fell flat. So until this new solution is implemented and adopted, I'll take my websites with a cookie banner, thank you.
It is an unfortunate choice that the campaign obsesses over the cookie banner, instead of trying to actually advance the solution that would make it obsolete.
> Yes, there are still some dark patterns employed by cookie banners, trying to trick you into accepting tracking. But they are not too hard to make out. And they can be fixed by tuning the regulation a bit: Require the opt-out to be the first choice and the only one with highlighting.
The fact that we are still talking about this literally a decade after the GDPR was adopted shows that this isn't working. It has turned into a cat-and-mouse game, and the regulators just don't have the manpower to effectively rules-lawyer every tiny change.
> when e.g. the Do Not Track header was tried, it just fell flat.
... because there was no reason to follow it. There was literally zero consequence for ignoring it.
This new proposal makes the Do-Not-Track v2 header legally binding. User sends the header and you still show a consent popup? You're breaking the law, simple as that. No weaseling yourself out of it, a simple screenshot is enough.
Any regulator could build a fully-automated scanner in half a day: ask the local TLD registrar for a mapping of websites to companies, have some script request the page and do a regex search for "cookie" (or use AI if you are feeling fancy), take a screenshot, pass it to an intern to double-check, then automatically send out a €100 fine. Double it every X weeks they haven't fixed it yet. Want to fight it in court? They have screenshot, you lose, now pay.
Culture has been rapidly regressing to a mean long before AI.
See e.g. modern cars. Until the mid 00s, you could tell different brands apart from far away. And you could perhaps also tell a few things about the owner from the color.
Or movies. The past 20+ years of high-budget film-making has been mostly rehashing franchises and remaking what has already been made.
AI is perhaps accelerating the trend and eliminating many opportunities to witness something original (e.g. a quirky amateur wedding video). But the trend had already begun.
I think that's only the excuse the car makers use for being lazy and not taking design risks.
Because homogeneity also extends to the interiors (which are not affected by regulations). And of course the offered colors, where we have almost full-circled back to "any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black".
I agree that the positive effects of Social Media is understated, and probably on purpose.
Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative. A generation has already grown with full distrust on what they learn from traditional media.
With that picture, addressing the (undeniable) negative effects of Social Media is only the sales pitch for introducing new legislation. The true goal of the legislation however is not to "save the children", but rather to ensure that the next generations will be obedient and meek.
> Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative.
Hasn't been true for a while. Now it grants people with money and state actors unprecedented control over what ordinary people are allowed to see and mold them to desired narratives.
It is still true. People with money and state actors have always had unprecedented control over what ordinary people are allowed to see... before the internet they were the ones controlling all of the corporate media. You don't think the press was molding people to desired narratives back then?
But it's obvious that social media also still allows grassroots action and organization in ways that simply weren't possible under old media. We need to be careful when talking about regulating or banning social media outright that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater - we will be losing freedoms when we lose it and centralizing control of media and communication with governments and corporations (even more so than with the big social media silos now.) And freedoms lost aren't easily gained back.
It still cuts both ways. Almost seemingly the entire internet was talking about the Epstein files non stop for months on end. Pre social media that anti establishment narrative wouldn’t have taken hold to nearly the same degree in my opinion. Unfortunately a lot of the discourse was complete nonsense, and misinformation was rife, but it still put the US government under A LOT of pressure, to the point where the AG was fired.
Then again, as I’m writing this, how much of that was due to manipulation and promotion by adversarial powers… almost nothing is truly organic anymore, or at least you can’t tell if it is, and I suppose that’s what you’re getting at.
> almost nothing is truly organic anymore, or at least you can’t tell if it is, and I suppose that’s what you’re getting at
Yes, but over time, even pre-Internet generations have learned to be skeptical of everything watched or read online. Children growing up in this environment will almost certainly adapt and learn to do the same.
So, at best, laws restricting Social Media are a nanny state overreach, and at worst dystopian Big-Brother-style narrative control.
We have witnessed a similar overreach in the distant past with printing-press regulation laws [1]. But at the time, they power structure was different so they could instate an outright ban without hiding behind "think of the children" or the Red Scare.
I think they can already sink any US ship that comes in range if they want to. And the US knows it too. But for different reasons, it's in neither's interest to go there.
Personal rule: Whatever you are asking (question or action), make it easy to spot. Place it either at the start or the end of its paragraph. Never ask >1 things in a paragraph, to make responding inline easier.
This is especially important in multi-recipient emails, where different people need to address different issues.
> I have no problem with Sony not offering DRM free versions of games that I can still download and play with the store. But if that goes away -> you must give me a path to local ownership.
I'm pretty sure that Sony and others would work their way around such legislation. E.g. spin-off shell "studios" that would be the legal game sellers, and when the time comes to sunset a batch of games, these "studios" would magically go bankrupt and cease to exist.
Then the onus would again put on the commuinity to break any encryption or otherwise reverse-engineer and preserve the games so they remain playable for legal owners. And the top-level companies would still be able to salvage and own the game franchise rights, so they would still be able to harass the game preservation community.
I don't think there's any workaround to stop this kind of cheating, other than mandating that (a) all DRM-protected or service-bound content needs to be submitted to an escrow organization (Library of Congress?) in a form that can be used to reproduce it locally, and (b) all submitted content is released to the public after X years.
Governments have failed to patch much more important loopholes that directly affect them. E.g. loopholes for corporate tax avoidance. I doubt they will put any effort at all for fixing loopholes related to dodging game preservation obligations.
The best way to not have loopholes is to put some effort in not creating them in the first place, not patching them later.
Can you come up with a theory off the top of your head why governments might have "accidentally" failed to patch a huge hole that their wealthy backers benefit from?
I have news for you, in a democracy in which bribery is illegal, these loopholes can be closed by politicans who actually want to.
Government-mandated source code escrow is certainly a reasonable requirement for copyright protection but you could also just legislate that "licensing" a work for resale also means being ultimately liable to make third party buyers whole if they have not received a local copy before - at the threat of loosing copyright protection for the work entirely.
This. Having survived dozens of mediterranean village summers without A/C, I am genuinely puzzled how it came to be considered a necessity. Is it "modern" construction methods that turned buildings into heat batteries? So, it became a necessity in the cities, and then spread everywhere because we became spoiled and our collective tolerance to heat dropped?
Last night, or rather this morning, the temperature reached it's lowest at 5 AM: 28C. When I woke up two hours later we had 33, and when I started working at 9, 38. The thermometer then reached 43 at noon, where it it still stuck 4 hours 45 minutes later, despite the rising humidity (I live by the sea), making the humidex reach 51. The temperature won't be below 34 before midnight, and might be below 30 at 5AM tomorrow morning.
I would say, we are like 80% there. Yes, there are still some dark patterns employed by cookie banners, trying to trick you into accepting tracking. But they are not too hard to make out. And they can be fixed by tuning the regulation a bit: Require the opt-out to be the first choice and the only one with highlighting.
Ad tracking is not going away tomorrow. If we ever are going to get rid of it, we first need legislation to defang it so it stops being a cash-cow. "Tracking prohibited by default" is a great end-goal, but we are not there yet.
Reading between the lines, it appears that there is some new solution proposed to "automatically communicate your privacy preference". That's nice, but when e.g. the Do Not Track header was tried, it just fell flat. So until this new solution is implemented and adopted, I'll take my websites with a cookie banner, thank you.
It is an unfortunate choice that the campaign obsesses over the cookie banner, instead of trying to actually advance the solution that would make it obsolete.
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