If you don't want to be tracked with a long-term cookie just configure your browser to not accept long-term cookies or to delete all cookies on shutdown. Problem solved.
I think it's the responsibility of the website to do the best that it can to protect the user's privacy, especially for those that don't know what a cookie is or does. On the contrary, most websites do the minimum they can get away with and try to squeeze every bit of data for profit.
Those companies can cry all they want but they get ZERO sympathy from me. I'm sick of having to install three extensions to counter their hostile behaviour towards my privacy.
What responsibility? Man up and be responsible for yourself. If you don't trust companies with your data just don't deal with them. Or use your anti-cookie extensions! You get ZERO sympathy from me.
I understand you feel companies have a hostile behavior towards your privacy. But you're part of a minority. If people really cared that much about cookies, the market would have responded accordingly and there wouldn't be any need for this kind of regulation at all. Why impose your obsession with privacy to the rest of us?
> If people really cared that much about cookies, the market would have responded accordingly and there wouldn't be any need for this kind of regulation at all.
That's naive.
For one thing, most people are not technically knowledgeable and don't understand the extent to which they are being tracked.
For another, even those who would care about such issues can't spend their entire lives becoming experts in every ethical, legal, regulatory and financial field that might affect them. It simply isn't humanly possible, which is one reason we have laws crafted by specialists but applying to everyone.
Your argument only makes any sense if everyone knows about what's going on, understands the implications, and still doesn't care.
> It simply isn't humanly possible, which is one reason we have laws crafted by specialists but applying to everyone.
You apparently haven't heard of the invisible hand.[1]
The role of experts is to educate and influence, not to impose their own values. People should be allowed to chose what's best for them and put their trust where they want, not be forced into putting their trust on bureaucrats.
I think you're making my point for me. Right now, a lot of people simply don't know what is going on or the implications it has for their privacy, so they can't possibly make informed judgements about whether they are willing to accept that behaviour. Any argument that some sort of market forces would drive change is completely negated as long as you keep your market in the dark about what is really going on.
Be that as it may, most of the sites I (at least) enjoy every day use the free content for advertising model. Very few of the sites would be able to make the transition to another business model that did not rely on advertising.
But that point (that sites give away free content for advertising) doesn't have much to do with blub's point (that many sites use hostile, non-privacy friendly tactics for advertising).
Basing your site revenue on advertising doesn't require trackig across sites/domains, supercookies written in flash, circumvention of user-defined browser privacy settings, etc (which is probably what blub is talking about). Honestly it doesn't even require cookies or retaining IP logs, though I don't think anyone here is arguing that those are malicious.
That's why your comment is a fallacy. Websites providing me content for free, and websites respecting the privacy of their users are not mutually exclusive concepts.
In an ideal world, yes. However, in the real world, most high paying advertising campaigns are retargeting based, thus requiring cross domain tracking. Excluding such tracking limits you to lower paying campaigns and remnant backfill. Most publishers are simply forced to accept such policies otherwise their earnings would reduce significantly.
I think most people would perfectly be able to do this, they just don't care. So why force privacy on them if they don't care about privacy? Even with this warning message I guess that 99% of the users will just click it away without reading it.
Not having the technical expertise does not mean not caring about privacy. A lot of technical people make that mistake. The users click it away without reading it because they don't understand it.
Hence, people might feel that a level of privacy should be provided by law, not by optional technical doodads.
You think most people understand the concept of cookies in the browser and how to change the settings for them?
Maybe people don't care about privacy as an abstract concept, I think people do care about possible outcomes - say my partner borrows my machine and starts seeing ads for the surprise holiday I was planning.
Not really. You can achieve similar dubious goals with various other techonologies that are not so readily disabled, or that are usually implemented independent of the browser itself anyway (e.g., "Flash cookies").
Sites could simply stop tracking users with long-term cookies. In this case, no warnings and popups need to be added. And everyone is happy...