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Cookie Walls Don’t Comply with GDPR, Says Dutch DPA

posted by chromas on Friday March 08 2019, @08:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the cookie-cutter dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/08/cookie-walls-dont-comply-with-gdpr-says-dutch-dpa/

Cookie walls that demand a website visitor agrees to their Internet browsing being tracked for ad-targeting as the ‘price’ of entry to the site are not compliant with European data protection law, the Dutch data protection agency clarified yesterday.

The DPA said it has received dozens of complaints from Internet users who had had their access to websites blocked after refusing to accept tracking cookies — so it has taken the step of publishing clear guidance on the issue.

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  • (Score: 1) by bussdriver on Saturday March 09 2019, @03:58AM (1 child)

    by bussdriver (6876) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 09 2019, @03:58AM (#811932)

    I remember when browsers all had settings to ask about accepting EACH cookie and back when you could use that option. It was a huge pain in the ass and you'd turn it off after a while of suffering and that was back in the day with far fewer cookies... plus some sites worked anyway until later years and a great many things will not work at all today... well since the late 90s it was unmanageable.

    Cookies are needed because HTTP is stateless.

    You do not fix this with cookies; ban them and we'll be back to 1x1 pixel image requests with URLs containing tracking IDs (still used in spam tracking) or other techniques which do not require cookies or JS plus todays fast servers waste CPU on so much more than the load of 90s whole-page generation to insert tracking IDs into every URL (killing your ability to cache anything... not that it matters now with SSL everything reducing caching...)

  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday March 09 2019, @08:41PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Saturday March 09 2019, @08:41PM (#812123)

    I remember when browsers all had settings to ask about accepting EACH cookie and back when you could use that option...

    The interface was horrible. It's like how email PGP encryption's / signing's CLi meant no one but programmers used it. We all know it could be done better. But because Thunderbird and Gmail never made a proper built-in solution, we all ended up having our mails read by three letter agencies and ad companies which happen to be Google's and Mozilla's revenue sources...

    Point is, they deliberately delivered a shitty broken interface so people won't use the feature and then removed it altogether.

    ban them and we'll be back to 1x1 pixel image requests with URLs containing tracking IDs

    Then we'll have the browsers clear the cache from very small images and limit redirects to same signed domains and forbid fragment. This is all technically doable. you just need to avoid having an ad company code your browser into a telescreen.

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