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Opinion: 5G Has an Exciting Future When It Comes To Dedicated Mobile Apps But Will Do Little To Improve Our General Browsing Experiences. (zdnet.com)
Charlie Osborne, writing for ZDNet: However, there is a problem that no-one is talking about: the conflict between the rapid acceleration of wireless technologies and politics which is, unwittingly, going to render some of these improvements potentially pointless.
In the UK and across Europe, there are two laws of particular interest: the EU's 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the so-called Cookie Law, passed in 2012. Ever heard someone expel a breath and a long list of expletives while they are attempting to look something up, book a service, or fact-check through the Internet on their smartphone? The likelihood is, they've come across both regulations in full force, stirring up annoyance and a rapid, frustrated smashing of fingers to screen as pop-ups scream for consent, T&Cs demand acceptance, and visitors must go through tick-lists of what data they are happy to be collected and in what manner.
The EU's GDPR, which enforced data reform, protection, and collection changes across Europe, has resulted in a plethora of pop-ups which delight in lecturing visitors on data collection practices. Combine these two well-meaning regulations and you have a melting pot of sheer frustration when it comes to mobile browsing. When you are forced to stop and be lectured by pop-ups at every turn which must be manually shut down, one by one, it really doesn't matter how quickly you were brought to the page in the first place.
In the UK and across Europe, there are two laws of particular interest: the EU's 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the so-called Cookie Law, passed in 2012. Ever heard someone expel a breath and a long list of expletives while they are attempting to look something up, book a service, or fact-check through the Internet on their smartphone? The likelihood is, they've come across both regulations in full force, stirring up annoyance and a rapid, frustrated smashing of fingers to screen as pop-ups scream for consent, T&Cs demand acceptance, and visitors must go through tick-lists of what data they are happy to be collected and in what manner.
The EU's GDPR, which enforced data reform, protection, and collection changes across Europe, has resulted in a plethora of pop-ups which delight in lecturing visitors on data collection practices. Combine these two well-meaning regulations and you have a melting pot of sheer frustration when it comes to mobile browsing. When you are forced to stop and be lectured by pop-ups at every turn which must be manually shut down, one by one, it really doesn't matter how quickly you were brought to the page in the first place.
Stop collecting my data, assholes.
Don't collect user data beyond what's absolutely needed for a website or app to work and the need for popups suddenly becomes less of a problem. For example, a taxi hail site or app would actually work fine anonymously, same as calling a taxi service. Payment would be negotiated between the driver and rider, with the driver paying the app authors for referrals. Another example: I recently downloaded a step tracker app that required creation of a cloud account to even start up. Never mind that step tracking can work 100% locally, and that another app I used was purely local.
End "cloud creep" and "data storage creep" and the GDPR becomes much less of a problem. If it makes it harder and more annoying to collect data on customers, it's doing its job.
All the popups are is a wanton act of malicious compliance. Of course, all that is required for compliance is to NOT COLLECT ANYTHING, but have a link at the bottom of a page that a user can follow to a page where they can enable data collection.
Instead, web hosts are complying with the law in the most obstructive, annoying way possible, so that users will complain about the law and get it overturned, again allowing site hosts to collect data transparently and without the users' knowledge or consent.
The subject line should include "in the UK/Europe"..... Their regulations may not impact other countries....
Sure they will. The EU is collectively the world's largest economy and it is the world's largest single market. If you want to export your stuff there you have to meet their standards and abide by their laws and regulations and in that case companies are in many cases best off applying these to their entire production California has a similar effect within the US, if they set emissions standards, most car companies in the US have to abide by them however much they may loathe having to do it. The alternative is deciding not to market their cars in the world's 5th largest economy which may be ideologically satisfying from a ultra-conservative point of view but which would be pretty stupid from a strictly capitalist point of view. So if you are a US, Canadian, Brazilian, Chinese software company and you want to market your stuff in the EU and draw revenue from there you'd better bone up on EU regulations or you may find yourself nursing a rather large headache. I suppose software companies are in the unique position that they can geo-locate customers and selectively screw them over or not based on whether they are rest-of-world or European, in which case I'm pretty happy to be in the latter category.
Methinks Charlie Osborne is in the pocket of the ad industry.
Hey, heard about this cool new technology? It's pretty much unrelated to my point that your browsing experience sucks because my corporate overlords have to ask for permission before they spy on you.