simpss

I know for a fact at least 1 bigger US company has a bot in slack that brings up any mentions of $companyname on hackernews...

Most likely, it's for tracking reasons. To figure out what sections people hit more and less...

I agree with you though. It's sad that content is being reformulated for those reasons.

yes, that's a possibility, but we're far from server-side GA implementations and we do have an option to make a data request to figure out what companies are doing.

If they get caught lying (and that tends to happen in the end) that's another violation that is taken seriously nowadays.

For example, my e-mail server started picking up messages from [email protected]. Making it pretty clear a company did not respect my wishes to completely delete all data and user account references. They simply changed my email in the DB.

Sorry. They do wait and force a choice before loading the external scripts.

That's the only mechanism one can use to really be compliant as GA (and other providers) stick identifiers onto the session as soon as the script has been loaded.

It took a while, but is starting to work.

Many "cookie banners" have finally started to work in the EU. Once you deny PII processing many sites don't load GA etc... The time of malicious compliance is starting to pass. Some sites have figured it out and realized they really don't need personalized analytics and have replaced implementations with privacy respecting ones(ex, plausible). This lets them remove the dark-patternish banner and no additional consent is required as all data is pooled together and one persons actions truly can't be singled out.

GDPR obviously has other good effects but as PII processing through cookies is what most people know, I chose that as an example. Email tracking links & pixels are another good example.

There's also a big difference between 2018 and 2025 when discussing GDPR in work contexts and saying that implementing this or that tracking would be illegal.

It's a slow process, but it's working as intended.

As I understand, these "data safety" sections are what Google gives app owners to comply with "right to be informed". If they say "we're sharing location data with third parties for Advertising purposes" I'm believing it.

I agree that they should really be asking for consent as well, but they don't seem to be doing that. We've got no way to use legitimate location related functionality and deny advertising related usecases. Remember, consent must be specific and granular.

It'll be a while, until enforcement catches up. It's taken ~6 years for cookie banners to get a "reject" button and those are really easy to review and enforce.

It'll happen though, enforcement is just slow. GDPR is a fairly well written regulation, as far as corner cases and catching workarounds goes. So unless the laws change, enforcement will catch up eventually.

4.0 will remove the expiration requirement finally.

using a cookie that is essential for non-essential purposes, is not allowed. So using a load-balancer cookie is fine, as long as it's only used for load balancing.

Once it's used for other (technically non-essential) needs as well, one needs to find another basis for processing or ask permission for that second purpose(consent basis).

Also, if the LB cookie can be non-identifying, while fullfilling the stated technical purpose, it must not allow identifying users. So for LB cookies, one must not use a unique ID per user, but an LB ID instead. Something like "node1", "node2" etc...