I don't see how this relates to GDPR. Please explain.
Yes. I agreed that the cookie law is partly dumb. The part of the cookie law that’s dumb is that it’s too narrowly scoped and should apply to all tracking technologies and techniques, for whichever purposes and vendors are or aren’t okay with the user. And it needs a systematic way for user-specified defaults across all websites, instead of leaving that to browser extensions.
Ideally this would be opt-in rather than opt-out for privacy reasons, but I do understand the valid argument that the subset of people who would explicitly opt in to tracking are not representative of the whole user population.
Probably the best balance of hassle vs privacy vs statistical validity is to require the major browsers to force a one-time explicit choice per purpose and/or per vendor without dark patterns involved, save those as defaults that get sent to the sites in a way that is legally mandatory for sites to respect, and allow per-site overrides using the same mechanism - instead of the current mess of shady consent pop-ups.
> I don’t see how this relates to GDPR. Please explain.
Both have more user-friendly requirements than people expect, both are widely violated in user-hostile ways, both are rarely enforced by regulators, and what rare enforcement does exist is slow, often reluctant, and with inadequate fines to change industry norms and sometimes not even much of the behavior of the fined company. They’re separate laws but with the same practical enforcement / incentive problems.
A recent definition of the German authorities clarifies that with „cookies“, they don’t interpret it narrowly as the specific browser technology but any kind of beacon or mechanism for tracking[0]:
> Gemeint ist damit beispielsweise der Einsatz von Cookies und anderen Technologien wie LocalStorage, Web Storage, das Auslesen von Werbe- und Geräte-IDs, Seriennummern, aber auch der Einsatz von ETags oder TLS-Session-IDs zum Zwecke des Trackings, Fingerprinting (z.B. durch das Auslesen von installierten Schriften oder Anwendungen) und vieles mehr. Der Einfachheit halber wird das im Folgenden i.d.R. unter dem verkürzenden Begriff „Cookies“ zusammengefasst.
They name as explicit examples not only cookies but LocalStorage, Web Storage, reading of any kind of serial numbers, ETags, TLS Session IDs (if used for tracking), and any other method for fingerprinting such as font profiling.
[0] https://www.baden-wuerttemberg.datenschutz.de/faq-zu-cookies...
As long as it's about cookies, the law is nonsense. Asking laypeople to "opt-in to tracking" so they can log into a website would render most websites inoperable.
> They’re separate laws but with the same practical enforcement / incentive problems.
I disagree with this. The cookie law popups pretend to ask users whether they consent to being tracked or not. Which is entirely misleading. With GDPR the pressure is on the companies to disclose what data they are collecting on you and give you the option of deleting it.
> Both have more user-friendly requirements than people expect, both are widely violated in user-hostile ways, both are rarely enforced by regulators, and what rare enforcement does exist is slow, often reluctant, and with inadequate fines to change industry behavior.
If I understand you correctly, you're saying the main downside to GDPR is it's not properly enforced. I agree with that.
