Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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A cookie notice that seeks permission to share your details with "848 of our partners" and "actively scan device details for identification".
If trackers are disabled, some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you.
Oh, the horror! (Not that we'll be seeing ads anyway.)
"some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you" is what we in mathematical logic call a vacuous truth.
which part is the (false) antecedent, and which part is the statement?
If you're looking for a never true anticedent reason that "some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you" is vacuous, that would work if they had an ad browser that was 100% effective on the site in question.
If you're looking for a never true anticedent for "If trackers are disabled, some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you.", it's that you can't disable all trackers with a cookie dialog because of the "necessary cookies" blanket exemption, the too many tick boxes to use "legitimate interest" loophole, and that most websites use "fingerprinting", meaning they reference you not by your cookies but by the worryingly extensive information they get automatically about your browser's version, settings, capabilities and features, and of course IP address. So it's never true that trackers are never disabled.
What the Wikipedia article doesn't explain well in my view, is that logically, "if A then B" means "B or not A" for short, or more explicitly, "in all circumstances, at least one of B, or (not A) , is true". This is vacuously (emptily) true if B is always true or A is always false, because it's not genuinely conditional at all.
So I suspect that they meant it was vacuous, not on the grounds that the anticedent could never be true, but that the consequent could never be false. Like "If you give me $10, the sun will rise tomorrow". In this case, all they need to assert is that "some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you" is true irrespective of whether trackers are disabled, which is almost certainly what they meant.
I'm curious that the Wikipedia article says the base case in an induction is often vacuously true, but I think they mean trivially true, like cos(1x) + sin(1x) = (cos x + sin x)^1, not vacuously true. I couldn't think of any induction proofs where the base case was literally vacuous except false ones used for teaching purposes, probably because I could only think of induction proofs of absolute rather than conditional ones. Probably there are mathematical fields where induction is used for conditional statements a lot that I'm forgetting.
In this case, all they need to assert is that “some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you” is true irrespective of whether trackers are disabled, which is almost certainly what they meant.
Ah I see. Thanks for the detailed writeup
Back in the early 2000s, we were promised that the magic of ads online would be that they are always relevant and not terrible anymore. This is why the targeting and tracking was valid to do.
It never happened. Not for a moment.
That doesn't include the partners of their partners
I blame all these polyamorous relationships with barely any rules.
This is for legal reasons mostly. They don't think anyone reads this so they went for the most blunt and transparent language, which also gives them the most legal certainty. The banner is missing the reject all button though, which in Europe is seen as required by many of the privacy regulators.
848 partners? Damn I hope y'all got tested.
Now name them all.
I think you actually usually can get them to list them all, never much interested, they're all going to be completely random names you never heard of, just so long as I can reject them all, that's all I care about, otherwise I have to browse a different website on principle.
I feel there's inflation over the word 'partners'
As someone who works in tech, I can confidently say that many people plainly do not understand what cookies do and why they exist. There are plenty of cookies that are good and useful, but third party advertising tracking cookies are the devil folks don't like. Necessary, performance and functional cookies are all chill.
Like the cookie that stores the "Reject All the cookies" response for your next visit 😇
Exactly - which would likely be a persistent necessary cookie on most websites.
A question: What is preventing the site using one huge cookie for all purposes, thus preventing fully functional use of the site without also enabling all other forms of tracking?
Cookies are very small snippets of code that have a specific purpose. Making a one-size-fits-all cookie would make them complicated and much harder to track - which goes against the point of a cookie. Also, cookies are often independent of each other because they are from different providers/different tools. Having a one-size-fits-all cookie would also present a security hazard and make laws similar to GDPR about cookie tracking difficult to implement. An example of a tool that actually does use one cookie is Adobe's Marketo. You can read some more about them here. https://termly.io/resources/articles/types-of-internet-cookies/
If the partner count is larger than the number of bananas I can imagine being in a bunch I decline cookies. If I can't disable performance or targeting cookies I decline cookies. These are my rules
til I can only imagine 0 bananas in a bunch
I switched to cookie allowlist, and manually add the sites I want to remember me. I don't want to play the cookie game anymore, period. The only reason they ask is because legally they have to, and even then they do the bare minimum and use dark patterns to make it as hard as possible to decline cookies.
No more cookies for anyone, should have used them responsibly in the first place.
Me: *logs on to their website*
Them:
Yea because I want a news site to have my precise geolocation data.
It's truly crazy how much our information gets shared these days and how long it lingers.
My house spent a few years as a rental. I still get mail from people who haven't lived here in over a decade (despite deliberate efforts to stop it).
My grandpa signed up for ever "store card" you can imagine to get all the deals and rewards programs. His landline virtually never stops ringing... On August 5th alone he got, no joke, 43 spam calls (I have his landline hooked up to Jolly Roger Telephone to try and filter some of this out and help him out, so I'm forming that statistic off of the emails from them).
It's completely ridiculous and all of it needs to stop.
Well. I appreciate the honesty.. I guess.
Don't worry bro, its just me and 2000 of my closest friends. Totally legit.
2 days and this post has fewer likes than number of companies that get your data for visiting the Verge. Holy crap, that's terrifying
Check out the Snowden movie. That's so much worse.
I'm on the verge.
I'd like to see a cookie notice that just says "it's your browser, figure out how to get it to handle cookies however you want. If you accept cookies we're gonna use them and you can safely assume we'll use them for anything and everything they might be useful for. European regulators can eat a bag of dicks."
I just occasionally wipe everything. I have to reenter passwords and such but it isn't a big deal.
We all have a fundamental right to privacy, which is constantly violated. Not just on a daily basis, but on a minute by minute basis.
But to play devil's advocate for a moment to assuage some FUD around posts like this, how many of the absurd amount of cookies overlap in otherwise innoculous ways. For instance, product tracking cookies. Say you bought a pumpkin on Amazon, and that drops a gorde cookie, a pumpkin spice cookie, a cornucopia cookie etc.
That's certainly not the same as buy a pumpkin, track your location around the nearest pumpkin patch, read your grandma's emails about pumpkins, and collect information to determine your likelihood of buying another pumpkin based on your sexual orientation.
The latter certainly exists, but does anyone know much about the former? How prevalent would they be in that 850?