Europe
Europe community on dbzer0. Intended to be a place to discuss European news, politics, or just general topics from a European perspective. Since this is on dbzer0 expect the community to lean more leftist-anarchist but a wide range of views are accepted here (within reason).
Rules:
1. No Bigotry or Hate Speech
Any forms of Homophobia, Transphobia, Queerphobia, Racism, or Ableism will be met with swift and harsh action and will not be tolerated here whatsoever. Bigots will be banned immediately on-sight. This includes apologia of it.
Trying to be politely or intellectually bigoted i.e. "Just asking questions" won't be tolerated.
2. No Zionism
Any forms of Zionism or Zionist rhetoric will not be tolerated here, this includes Zionist apologia, accusations of antisemitism towards anti-Zionists, or blatant denial or downplaying of the genocide towards Palestinians. Any attempt to uphold or prop up the IHRA definition of antisemitism, will be treated as Zionism.
Anyone engaging in Pro-Zionist sentiment or apologia will be actioned in accordance with its severity.
Note: Trying to find loopholes or whataboutery to see what is or isn't genocide denial or Zionism will be treated as a violation of this rule. Don't test us.
3. Stay Civil
Please maintain civil discourse in the community. Do not engage in arguments with others, name-calling, or insults. Note that calling out bigotry or Zionism is not considered an insult. In heated arguments users are encouraged to or even required to disengage failure to do so will result in mod action.
4. No Misinformation
Spreading of misinformation intentionally in this community is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Spreading misinformation hurts the credibility of the community and can mislead people sometimes in dangerous ways. Users who intentionally post misinformation as articles, comment answers, or in attempt to win arguments will be actioned swiftly.
Note: This includes Russian and Chinese propaganda. Users with a history of such posting will be banned on sight.
5. No AI Content
Please do not post articles or content primarily created using generative AI. Generative AI content may contain misinformation or be lower quality and thus is discouraged. Posts and comments featuring it will be removed. However this community does not allow or tolerate Anti-AI trolling or hostility and users who engage in such behavior will be actioned for it, additionally Anti-AI trolling violates Rule 3 and often Rule 4 so it is generally unacceptable already.
Note: Rules 1 & 2 may be subject to preemptive mod action due to their severity, and they apply to a user's entire post history. Not just this community.
view the rest of the comments
Yeah it's weird AF how some Americans blame european governments and not their corpos who have collectively chosen to do popups instead of finding alternative ethical business models.
Even my own government (Belgium) does those popups. This is not solely a "bad american" thing.
Is the website outsourced to a private company?
No. For example this is the website we need to use for tax reasons: https://www.minfin.fgov.be/ full screen cookie window, doesn't work if you have an ad blocker.
In order to authenticate yourself on the previous website they made this: https://mygov.be/. Also full screen cookie window. To then lead you to a download that only works on non-rooted android or apple phones. This is a NextGenerationEU project. This is the EU's vision for it's own digital future. It sucks embarrassingly hard.
Well honestly then I don't know, you win
From what I can find, they use Google Analytics to track website visits and it's why they have cookie popups, but beyond vague statements I can't find anything about why they want this data in the privacy policy.
My best bet would be that they can track how many (unique) people use the site and how often they use it and for what so they can ask for appropriate financing from the federal government come budget season, that's also why the NHS uses it.
The website looks very nice so I'm fairly certain it's made by a private third party, at least in the UK everything that can be privatised/outsourced, is, even private companies often hire some other company to make their website, so I have no proof.
Neither of us is a winner here. This whole legislation sucks for everyone involved.
We have to authenticate with a government ID in order to use those applications. So they have all the information to count unique users even without google tracking.
It's more about how the people use the site, and which page and when and how, which devices, and how often etc. You would also want to track anyone before they sign in, and it's also a way to identify issues/bugs and accessibility and identify outages/incidents and security issues without those being directly reported.
By "you win" I meant to say I've no idea why your local government would issue popups, which I guess means this isn't just limited to American megacorps though, hence I retract that specific argument because of your counter example.
No, it doesn't, I'm still massively in support of it, what?
I absolutely stand by GDPR, even if you found one example of public entities that for some reason also use cookie popups instead of properly complying, even if they all did that, I would not for a moment wish it any other way, no public or private body of any kind has any right to any of my information for any reason without my explicit informed properly scoped consent for each given interaction.
I think the legislation is great and I would support a massive expansion of it and the US equivalent in CCPA.
For as long as data has any value, we must regulate it lest predatory orgs will abuse it and take the working class for all they're worth straight to a surveillance state or a corporotocratic dystopia.