UK plan to scrap cookie consent boxes will make it ‘easier to spy’ on web users

31 comments
  1. Thank god, get rid of these annoying pop-ups on almost every single website. Track me if you want to, at the best you’ll be disappointed and worst I get ads that are relevant.

  2. Using ‘the web’ has become very painful and limited anyway. Even after you’re done with that stupid cookie pop up every time you dare to go on a new site, you then have to either unblock your ad blocker to view the content, or indulge in a bunch of other pop-ups and subscription demands. 2008 was the prime period for me.

  3. Some of the comments in this thread surprise me.

    I always take the time to hit “reject all” on every popup I encounter, and if the site has decided to break gdpr compliance in not providing an option to opt-out of tracking and advertising cookies, I simply go to another site. Fuck them.

  4. The whole thing is technically incompetent anyway. Instead of a range of independent popups someone should be able to set their preferences once inside their browser and have them communicated to every site they visit. Like a standard, like a techie would come up with instead of a politician.

  5. Did i wake up in a country with no leadership because this seems like something china would do or putin.

    So if this became law the could legally spy on our history be it private pr public and get away with it but if i stood outside downing street with a camera i’d be breaking the law.

    Someone get that fucking lunatic out fast.

  6. Cookie consent boxes make the web more dangerous..

    They create a culture of people clicking “I accept” by default just to view the basics of a webpage. So each time a page loads “I accept”

    It’s kind of alert fatigue you are so used to alerts that you miss the really important ones when they want to do slightly more.

  7. I want the tories out next election.

    They’re acting like a bunch of American politicians.

  8. Why are the government going out of their way to make so many things worse… Erasmus, Horizon, Decimalisation, now cookies/tracking?

    It’s like we’ve shot ourselves in the foot and are doubling down by hacking off the whole leg 😭

  9. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-data-laws-to-boost-british-business-protect-consumers-and-seize-the-benefits-of-brexit

    The fucking title of this press release hahaha. “Boost British Business”, aka, “we’re fucking desperate, please anyone, anything, come to our country and do business, we’re begging you”. Mass collection and analytics of user/consumer data is a very lucrative business model, I’m sure lots of corporations will appreciate the new legislature and loopholes.

  10. Cookie consent makes little difference to tracking. I will still “spy” on you lol. Do you go into shops and ask to be removed from their CCTV footage? Cookies and what they track are a lot less harmful/not harmful than CCTV.

  11. The cookie consent law is a terrible piece of legislation. Not because of the idea, the idea of a good one, but because of the requirements for implementation.

    It’s intrusive, confusing, to much to read, not obvious on its purpose, and incentivises clicking accept.

    Getting rid of it isn’t necessarily a good idea, but the current legislation isn’t good

  12. Those who really care will install a cookie management plugin.

    Get rid of the cookie shit and more importantly, article 13.

  13. Who honestly cares… Browser fingerprinting exists if people really want to track you. People using cookies maliciously are hardly following GDPR guidelines anyway.

  14. Get rid of the fucking things they do nothing.

    GDPR is a joke, it’s there to keep HR business partners and other such cretins in work.

    If your scared of being tracked then bugger off and hide in a hole.

  15. The requirement was always to default to no tracking and allow opt in. If a site gives you a popup about cookies its breaching the law, if it defaults to tracking then doubly so, it really is that simple.

    But with the mass underfunding of the ICO (and its been useless even with the data protection act and all its successors) its no wonder things aren’t getting done. The law is perfectly fine, its the enforcement that is intentionally broken and companies are exploiting the populace to try and get rid of the law. Oh look its working the ignorant who don’t know how GDPR is meant to work have fallen for the trap the Conservatives laid by underfunding the enforcement organisation and letting companies get away with the breaches and used it to leverage the populace.

    If we do away with this law we loose the ability to do business in the EU in an substantial way, GDPR is a big part of interacting with the EU in general and removing any provision of it, even failing to keep up with it will be devastating to any UK web business which will have to be aligned to the EU. It will just cause a mass exodus of those businesses to the EU and a bunch will just decide the UK market isn’t stable enough to worry about.

  16. And will allow your data to be sold and used by multiple scrupulous third party users.

    John Oliver dida really good piece on the effects of those in America where online data protection is virtually non existent there.

  17. Good, the ICO is completely inept and toothless and cookie consent pop ups followed by the gdpr pop ups ultimately create hassle while simultaneously not achieving anything of any real merit. There’s been barely any action on those companies that didn’t apply the legislation and those that did instead largely opted to implied consent/opt out. It never worked from day one.

    Everyone talking about privacy issues doesn’t seem to understand that cookie consent and the pop ups around it don’t actually do anything. If you click decline I can still drop cookies if I want to, you’re just letting me know I shouldn’t.

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