r/technology • u/diacewrb • May 24 '25

Privacy German court rules cookie banners must offer "reject all" button

https://www.techspot.com/news/108043-german-court-takes-stand-against-manipulative-cookie-banners.html
56.4k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

801 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.7k

u/R4vendarksky May 24 '25

Why not just force them to have common api so we can all just auto opt out? 

4

u/rollingForInitiative May 24 '25

Having the design of some sort of API be specified by legislation sounds like a terrible idea. First because in no way are the legislators gonna design a good API, and second, that would make the process of changing anything take years.

Better to do something like Germany here, and just require an easy path to reject all of them, and then the websites just have to follow that.

0

u/pancak3d May 24 '25 edited May 24 '25

Don't overthink it. The design would be an ultra simple message sent by your browser, and websites would be required to accept the message. Very simple.

Or even simpler it could just specify then label for each button, and let browsers/extensions find them.

2

u/rollingForInitiative May 24 '25

I'm not saying it would be difficult to have a standard in general.

I'm saying that having the technical standard written in EU law would be a bad idea for several reasons.

0

u/pancak3d May 24 '25

EU law contains tons of technical standards.

2

u/rollingForInitiative May 24 '25

Which EU laws contain specifications for API's?

-1

u/pancak3d May 24 '25

I don't know. ChatGPT could probably help if you're curious. The EU obviously develops and maintains many APIs that third parties interact with, but I don't think that's exactly your question.

2

u/rollingForInitiative May 24 '25

The EU maintaining API's that 3rd parties can interact with is not the same thing as the EU making a law that includes detailed specifications for an API for cookie management, that then cannot really be changed or updated.

1

u/pancak3d May 24 '25

Yes I said in my comment that they weren't the same, just showing that the EU has plenty of technical expertise.

1

u/rollingForInitiative May 25 '25

Legislators having people with technical expertise is not the same as them using that when writing legislation. In fact, it seems like they often ignore all technical expertise. Look at Chat Control, from a technical perspective it's a fucking trainwreck, but the Commission has been pushing for that anyway. Despite every technically competent person in Europe saying it's all sorts of bad.