Cookie Banners Are Going To Get Less Annoying
GDPR in the European Union is changing a bit to allow for easier cookie banners.
We all know those annoying banners at the bottom of Web pages that ask us for permission to add cookies to our computers.
Most of us just click accept without much thought. Which is good for marketers, but does little to protect visitor privacy.
The EU is now revising the General Data Protection Regulation, aka GDPR, the privacy law that inflicted the cookie banners on us all over the Web, to be bit more streamlined.
What Does GDPR Mandate, Again?
At the base is four restrictions on the collection, storage, and processing of people's personal data:
- There must be a specific, lawful reason to process the data. Websites can't just collect data for the sake of collecting data.
- Personal data must be encrypted, which is always a good thing. Though many companies still seem to struggle with this one.
- You have a right to a copy of your data, I've never asked for a copy of my data from a Website, but it's nice to know I can.
- You can ask for your data to be deleted, this can be handy, but can you imagine the amount of requests you'd have to do to delete your data from the plethora of sites on the Web?
Ben Lovejoy, over at 9to5Mac, makes a good point that not all cookies are bad. Many are actually useful. They keep us logged into Websites and remember our preferences. It's the cookies collecting marketing data that are questionable and make it so we get these stupid popups.
To be honest these consent banners don't stop malicious use of our data, because most of us just click "Accept."
Ben writes:
Because they can be used in nefarious ways, and can compromise our privacy, GDPR required websites to seek consent to store cookies on our devices. The result is an annoying pop-up on almost every website we ever visit.
Worse, many websites are guilty of malicious compliance. They offer us a choice between agreeing and another button for managing cookies. If we click the second one, we are presented with a deliberately long-winded and confusing array of choices designed to persuade us that it’s much faster and easier simply to agree.
So What's The Update?
The EU is changing the regulation to mandate that browsers have a section in the preferences to set your cookie usage permissions. So you don't have to set permissions each and every site. This is going to be great.
But It's Not All Altruistic – Enter Artificial Intelligence 🤖
The changes, proposed by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, changes core elements of the GDPR, making it easier for companies to share anonymized and pseudonymized personal datasets. They would allow AI companies to legally use personal data to train AI models, so long as that training complies with other GDPR requirements.
This is probably to make sure the EU doesn't fall even more behind in the AI race against the US and China.
Not Just An EU Problem
You might not be in the EU, but this still applies to you. Since we live in an interconnected world, we all face these data protection hurdles and right now these dialogs. I wonder if the privacy laws in the US, like those in California, are going to adjust to require something similar with the browsers controlling the permissions.
Better For Marketers
As a marketer and a Web designer, I'm excited to not have to gum up the works on my site with a pesky banner that no one ever reads. Once this update comes into effect, the onus is no longer on me and my clients to be responsible for the dialog. We just need to comply with the settings set at the browser level.
Hopefully having the ability to set it once in the browser and then go about our day, will make it more effective as well, with people actually taking the time to set it up correctly.
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The Latest From The Entrepreneur's Enigma Podcast
Appearances On Other Podcasts
I talked with Abbey about batching episodes and building systems to make your podcast successful. Listen to the episode here.
Sponsor
Looking for guests? Want to be on podcasts? Check out Podmatch! I use it for both getting on podcasts and finding quality guests. It's well worth it and affordable too!
Web Jawn
Liz Mayer & Paul Riismandel
This is a good sign and makes sense since listening to podcasts can be done while doing other things.
Dominic Preston
This is good to see. Control the amount of AI Slop you get fed in the app.
Daniel J. Lewis
I agree with Daniel here. It's better to take a beat and put off the next episode than cram in something that's less than the quality of what you want to show.
Saskia
Saskia works for the Newsmast Foundation, a social web foundation that focuses on apps and knowledge sharing on the decentralized social web. This is a good article to read.
Frank Landymore
Why would anyone think that putting a general purpose LLM into a kid toy would be a fantastic idea. Come on people think first!
Lauren Feiner
It's an attack on Section 230, but focused mostly on the algorithmic social media out there. 🤔
Robert Booth
Kind of scary how much of the Web went down because of a bug. It wasn't a fun morning over here, that's for sure!
Jeff Umbro
Worthy of a read if you ask me.
Anil Dash
I can't agree more. A Substack newsletter is exactly that... A NEWSLETTER. Hell, call it a blog if you want. It's not a "Substack!" Substack is not a f*cking noun!!!!
Barry Schwartz
Was only a matter of time.
Some good alternatives to Discord for community building.
Web Find
Birgit Pauli-Haack
This is neat. Thought I'd share! Pretty comprehensive.
matthew burgos I designboom
Pretty cool. Not marketing related, per se, but wanted to share it.
There is a Masonic Lodge on the Moon thanks to Astronaut and Mason Buzz Aldrin.
That's It For This Week! Keep Rocking It!
-Seth
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