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My Samsung TV which I bought 8 years ago now suddenly asks me if it's okay they share data with their over 200 partners. They have the nerves to headline this with "protect your privacy". Generally not a big fan of EU policing but I wish somebody sued them over this.
> Improving Your Experience and Protecting Your Privacy on Samsung TV Plus
> Samsung and our 264 partners use information about you and your device in order to provide, analyse and improve the Samsung TV Plus app. This includes the processing of personal data such as unique IDs for personalised advertising.
Still wondering how "freely given, informed, specific and unambiguous" is fulfilled by "sure you can opt-out of tracking - by buying a premium subscription. Also, here are our 589 'partners' that all claim legitimate interest" but here we are.
Legitimate interest does not exist and is a loophole in the law which should be killed. You can challenge it but the authorities who should handle that are grossly underfunded.
It does exist, but the allowable use cases that third parties can claim "legitimate interest" for need to be severely restricted. At present, it's a joke - a single site can have dozens or even hundreds of companies claiming "legitimate" interests, but which are anything but legitimate.
Even if they were well-funded, I suspect the history of regulatory capture, at least in the U.S., shows that meaningful pro-consumer reforms get slow-walked until the underlying bills dilute and/or die in committee.
Or, if reforms do pass, they get reversed the next time the counter-party gains enough power in Congress to roll back the progress.
"legitimate interest" was supposed to be for things like remember-login cookies and the like. Not for advertisers going "my interest is legitimate because it's how I make money".
Legitimate interests exist, and the loophole exists because otherwise legitimate use cases like security audits or fraud detection would be impossible.
Most of EU laws are "these are sensible defaults and we expect you to behave like adults". As we've seen, digital services are anything but.
Enforcement means nothing if you can't ship a fix. Legal team writes the banner, ops team gets paged when consent logic breaks prod at 3am. Good luck with that.
The EU just needs to make tracking of any kind full on illegal, especially targeted advertising. I don't give a shit if your business can't survive without invasive tracking of every single facet of your user's existence, you deserve to be shut down if that's your one and only viable business model.
Just ban ads already. I don’t want ads. I don’t want to be tracked. I should have the right to never interact with either, unless explicit, informed and single-button-revocable consent is given.
Geofencing sounds simple till you've actually built it. IP databases are wrong constantly, VPNs dodge it, and now you're maintaining a whole extra system just to *not* comply with something. Easier to just build one clean consent flow and ship it everywhere.
The rest of the world would be happier if websites geofenced the cookie consent banners to EU IPs only and just left the rest of us alone, with any combination of cookies/tracking.
I'm again reminded that a significant percentage of HN posters and readership are those working in US AdTech, who's very salaries are dependent on abusing peoples privacy. Hardly surprising a hefty part of the HN demographic, like yourself, slants towards opposing decent privacy laws.
The whole world would be even happier if websites stoped this nonsense tracking of every single action bloating a single webpage with 20Mb of JS, connecting to 50+ domains, impacting accessibility, data usage & interactivity.
Ran a heatmap tool once, half clicks logged were people mashing back button cause page froze from tag manager loading 40 scripts. PM saw "high engagement" zone. Was rage clicks on broken nav.
I read the complaint and it seems to have nothing to do with the reject all button and is only about transparency and informed consent.
They state that you cannot reasonably read all those privacy policies and thus you also cannot give informed consent.
If I understand it correctly giving informed consent for over 1700 tracking partners of a single page isn't realistic. You as a single person cannot be expected to truly understand what it is you are agreeing to when you click accept.
It's the definition of "informed consent". Can I actually go through a couple of thousand 3rd parties and confirm that their policies all conform to my data handling requirements?
The issue is that even if you click "Accept" there is no reasonable way to infer that the user has given informed consent, because becoming informed would likely take days or weeks.
As such the conditions for data sharing are not met and it is likely to be illegal.
> becoming informed would likely take days or weeks.
Then it is basically impossible to consent to any kind of tracking, because users cannot become informed for any number of 3rd parties -- even a single one.
A simple diagram of them opening a user’s mouth and cramming 200 logos down our throats would inform pretty well, especially if (this being the greater fantasy) the corresponding opt-in was buried deep at the bottom of a list in an obscure settings menu.
I'm not sure I agree that you couldn't become informed about a single one. I think one is probably reasonable.
Presumably, if your service was important enough to the user and the third party tracking integration important enough to you that you're willing to ask the user to spend a few hours reviewing their 'contract' with the third party, then such a thing could be done. I imagine a lot of people would click the “I’m not reading all that” button though.
You could even envision a simplified sort of 'tracking declaration' as is done with (for example) insurance products here in Australia, where a sort of statutory precis gives the reader a good, bullet-pointed outline of the policy
I would wager that with a well formatted precis like that, it may even be possible to consent to as many as half a dozen 3rd parties. I doubt many people would though, if it was spelled out that blatantly and clearly what it's all about.
And isn't that the point? Hide what's really happening in so many walls of text nobody could ever conceivably bother with them?
So I think the person filing this suit is correct. The behaviour on show here is an end-run around even the idea of informed consent, and needs to be squashed.
(Edit - instead of all these cold GDPR compliance boxes and walls of text, sites should be honest: letting advertisers track you is how we make money, please click yes and we can get paid for your visit”, but of course it’s much more effective just to confuse people into ignorant acquiescence, or try to get people riled up about “stupid gdpr compliance nonsense”)
Disagree that this makes consent impossible, it means bundling 1,741 partners into one checkbox is the problem, not consent itself. Nobody's asking users to read 1,741 policies, they're asking sites to stop pretending that's what "accept" means.
These single click "informed" consent is akin to a bartender mixing you a drink with 30 different ingredients and hoping you don't notice they include cyanide and rohypnol.
Every law is made under some assumptions about the scale of things. For example, judiciary procedures were designed assuming certain number of active cases. Citizen services and bureaucracy around them is designed assuming some amount of work and staff size. Look at the US immigration / green card processes.
The designers of GDPR would have not expected thousands of partners sharing the data collected in a single click. The next review of the legislation would probably pick it up.
Why wouldn't GDPR apply to apps? It's not a cookie banner requirement, it is a regulation for data protection because companies were (are) selling harvested personal details and saving it for eternity.
Having personal information isn't always a bad thing, it would be really annoying if I had to fill out a form with my bank every couple of years to tell them my address, which hasn't changed and is a legitimate interest. Amazon telling everyone that I bought some athletes foot cream is not.
GDPR is a General Data Protection Regulation. It applies to everything.
10 years. It's been in force for 10 years. The tracking/ad industry has really managed to brainwash everyone into thinking it's about cookies (even though GDPR doesn't even mention cookies except as an example of tracking)
There is the ePrivacy directive as well, which mentions cookies (as a representative example), and I think it requires user consent in cases where GDPR doesn't.
GDPR applies to we the people and the organizations who hold our data. Doesn't matter if it's morse code on paper strips.
If we can dictate warnings on tobacco packages, we can dictate the wording on consent banners to not be "We care about your privacy" but instead "We want to track you for profit".
Ran into this w/ an app's "manage partners" screen, like 200 toggles. Wrote quick userscript to click-all "reject" buttons in one loop, saved as bookmarklet. Faster than fighting UI each time, but yeah shouldn't need that hack at all.
When you try to maximize ad revenue, you add multiple advertising SDKs to your website, each of which can often do live bidding with hundreds of ad/data brokers
You can usually check the ads.txt file on a website to see which companies are allowed to bid for ad space on there. For example, for dict.cc, the website in question:
analytics: A/B testing, "if x does user click y"?, unique page visits, etc.
ads: integrating with an ad provider comes with hundreds of trackers, because they want to
- know if you bought a product after clicking on an ad
- show you targeted ads for shoes after you googled shoes
- build a profile of you (age, gender, location, profession) to show relevant ads across different websites
Likely has little relationship to what is actually in the page. They had to do GDPR, didn't or couldn't spend a lot of time on it -- or had an especially conservative corporate counsel -- and ended up just getting a list of every company they've ever worked with, for any reason, "to be safe".
For most companies this can easily be thousands of partners, and going through that list and figuring out exactly who might get data in reality, through every possible permutation of workflow, is a horrendously expensive proposition.
You might be surprised how many well-meaning regulations leave even the best-intentioned implementers in an impossible situation.
Oh yeah, that combination of fear and lack of knowledge probably plays a big part. I was once involved with creating a privacy policy for a B2B(!) web application. What a farce. In the end, the process was cut short (counsel too expensive and not nearly familiar enough with tech). The resulting document was at least 50 % stuff the app simply does not do.
What, is "accept all" somehow not acceptable to GDPRers anymore? We'll have to manually click through multiple forms of cookie allowance just to get to the damn website? What a mess.
Small nit: it's not GDPR itself mandating extra clicks, that's the ePrivacy Directive covering cookies. Consent just has to be as easy to refuse as to accept, so a single "deny all" button is compliant too. Sites just choose not to build it that way.
> Improving Your Experience and Protecting Your Privacy on Samsung TV Plus
> Samsung and our 264 partners use information about you and your device in order to provide, analyse and improve the Samsung TV Plus app. This includes the processing of personal data such as unique IDs for personalised advertising.