Posted by rapnie 12 hours ago
So now they'd have a new popup that says "reconfigure your browser to accept tracking, or pay us, or you can't access the page". Which isn't really an improvement.
1: https://www.cnil.fr/fr/cookie-walls-la-cnil-publie-des-premi... (in french, sorry)
It wasn't on EU Commission to "finally propose a solution". The soluton has always been there.
Somehow, Google, aka world's largest tracking and advertising company incidentally making the worlds' dominant browser and completely dominating all web standards, couldn't be bothered, and instead was pushing crap like FLoC
Google knows if you can set this once it's game over for their adverting business. At least with the cookie banners, there's a possibly you won't refuse every banner.
Especially those banners that only have "Accept" or "More options" with all those checkboxes to clear.
I guess what I'm saying is, there is no good solution here. I don't want every site I visit to require a usage fee just to browse. Imagine if slashdot turned into WSJ with a paywall for every article.
Kagi already does something like this, and cool - if you use it enough, maybe its worth a subscription. I dont find myself googling (searching) much anymore, so paying to do so just becomes something i need to find a way around. Like API token usage for AI, using it is like making a new recipe in the oven every time. You expect it to work but you have to invest the time and money into the attempt before you can find out the results (whereas you dont have to do this on free chatgpt, google search with ai, etc as comparison). Too much investment without guarantee of results. I'm fine without that guarantee as long as im not wasting my time and money upfront.
Anyways, thanks for letting me rant
Sure, but magazines get a massive portion of their revenue through advertising without trackers. Same with television, or radio, or billboards.
And the ad space isn't exactly very healthy either. Take a large Youtube channel like Linus Tech Tips, for example: AdSense only accounts for 10% of their revenue! Youtube has been drowning people in ads and it still barely pays any money.
I think we should seriously consider the possibility that targeted ads might be less profitable overall. Ad blockers didn't become a thing solely because ads appeared on the web. Ad blockers became popular when ads became obnoxious and privacy-invading. With the current state of the web ad blockers are a hard requirement for a reasonable browsing experience, so the only people seeing ads are the handful of suckers too ignorant to install them.
But if ads aren't as invasive and obnoxious, people would have far fewer reasons to install ad blockers. See for example the Acceptable Ads program of Adblock Plus. If switching to user-respecting ads resulted in a significant portion of people turning off their ad blockers, it could very well result in an increase in ad revenue!
I am kind of wanting to f around and found out. I missed the old internet were most of the big websites are run by hobbyist. I know some of them may not be able to pay the bill without ad. May we can figure out something once we leveled the playing field
Another good one to have the "hide Youtube shorts" filter, featured on HN a while back.
Also I wanna know when websites don't give a shit about my privacy and therefor have to show a cookie banner. While theoretically not consenting should mean not collecting blocking it altogether and modifying page content might mean "all bets are off". If the website expects you to have made a decision that might wrongly consider it consent.
Consent-O-Matic says "I don't consent".
> Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner.
Fortunately, if you have uBlock Origin, you can enable Easylist cookie notices under annoyances and avoid most of them. Combine with blocking third-party cookies, and the problem pretty much disappears.
The fact that the EU tried to regulate this stuff is a shame, because regulation is not a good remedy. End-users have agency here. The solution is to enable end-users to have control in their browser (which they always did, so it's an issue of education, like so many things).
Shame that Google is trying to kill uBO though. Extremely pleased that Brave continues to support it.
The Do Not Track header is the only technology needed. The rest is compelling companies to obey it.