Popups were never required in the first place, what was required was to get consent before tracking users.
Websites that seem they need to track users immediately and across their entire web space implemented popups because it's the only way to get consent before showing content, but that's the website's choice, not a consequence of the law.
No, it isn't required for sites to have a popup. There's a thousand less shitty ways web devs could implement this, up to and including just not using 3rd party cookies. But that's harrrrrrrrrd so we turned the web into a huge mess of crap.
This is the right answer. I think the popups come mostly from a) an American interpretation of an European law and b) as a way to spite the users while "trying" to do the bare minimum to comply with the letter of the law (which might not be accepted as compliance)
And none of this farce would be needed if sites wouldn't track individual users. Showing ads don't require tracking individual users (and retargeting is frankly BS)
That was around before DNT (just). Given that the popups were required in any case and are site-specific acceptance, why bother with DNT? It was more work to implement for zero benefit. Admittedly that also applies to the popups, but those were less optional.
The popups are a result of tracking, not GDPR. Websites without tracking don't need to have them.
It's somewhat amusing that the overlap of garbage content farms and sites with annoying consent popups is almost perfect. I wonder if it could be used for search engine ranking.
Is your contention that all of these websites and providers all simultaneously decided, incorrectly, to use these popups and that there is no legal requirement for them?
Yes popups are not part of the law. they are an implementation choosen by the websites.
Also I put a bit of responsibility on us, the consumers. It does not seem to me that popups are such a real issue since no website reported: we are removing popups because users are so annoyed that they stopped visiting our website.
These pop-ups are making it hard to enjoy the Internet, what do you suggest to do to get rid of these pop-ups?
Embrace them. Learn to love them. They're a good feature. Making websites explicitly require permission to do (subjectively) negative things like tracking users is a massively positive step in the right direction towards us all having ownership and agency over of our lives as we spend time online. Sure, it means we have to do a little work to say yes or no when a site wants to do something, but that's the cost of privacy. It's not very high.
There could be technical solutions (eg browsers could sent a header to automatically consent with the initial request) or you could use a plugin (eg consent-o-matic), but really, this stuff is important enough that "Eurgh! I had to click a button again! I'd sacrifice my privacy not to have to do that any more!" is a really bad take in my opinion.
The popups happen because that turns out to be what the legislation is incentivising. The solution is to make different legislation that doesn't incentivise popups.
Some examples (obviously not problem-free, but just to show that a solution space exists):
* No tracking even with permission
* No tracking unless the user mailed you hard-copy permission
* No popups
* No popups unless user testing shows that a user who hates popups, doesn't care about privacy and is just clicking stuff to get to see the site, will decline tracking at least 80% of the time
This is because of a law, but also because nearly all commercial websites try to track you. I would be completely fine with forbidding it in any case and destroying a very parasitic advertising industry if the popup is too much.
The popups are annoying specifically because the rules lumped Google Analytics in with all the bad tracking that evil companies do.
I want to know how many people visited my website. So does every website. It's something that websites need to know. We use Analytics to handle that for us, and because of this silly EU rule we're all technically breaking the law by not bothering every single visitor with annoying popups.
Now there are in fact bad companies collecting data on individual people, correlating it between sites on the backend, and using it for nefarious purposes. Those are presumably the reason these stupid laws were passed in the first place, and it would be nice if they actually did need to show a button for you to click.
But since the law says that everybody needs to show that button or lose the ability to know how many people saw their site, you never know whether you're getting the button for an evil site or just one of the millions of other sites you visit every day.
I don't blame the evil companies even a little bit for this mess. It's the people who passed these terribly thought out laws. They'll keep passing more of them until we stop letting them.
really?! All this time. Why didn't you fix the thing where they decided every single website should have a popup, instead of browser vendors having an option?
The pointless popups became acceptable again because of the pointless cookie law forcing developers to implement dark ui. By the way did you know browsers use a thing called cookies? Scary i know.
I think you're misunderstanding what the poster was talking about. You're taking "the popups we see today were never recommended nor required by the original regs" to mean that the popups have become something that wasn't intended by the regulation (but the regulation did require popups).
I think that the poster was saying that the popups themselves as a concept were never recommended nor required by the regulations.
Websites that seem they need to track users immediately and across their entire web space implemented popups because it's the only way to get consent before showing content, but that's the website's choice, not a consequence of the law.
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