Eternal Density wrote:Who's Rohan?
Rohan_(Middle-earth) from The Lord of the Rings
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Eternal Density wrote:Who's Rohan?
Also I had no idea this was a thing until the onslaught of emails a few weeks ago. I have a tiny website which technically people can create profiles on but no one actually uses it. Maybe I should switch some or all of it off?
Eebster the Great wrote:And this is the intended effect of the bill?
Zamfir wrote:It says that if companies want to store information on people, they have to ask permission while giving the purpose.
Eebster the Great wrote:But like, if you don't want tracking cookies, write legislation about tracking cookies. Requiring a declaration regarding cookies on every single website is clearly useless. It does the exact opposite of the intended purpose.
Eebster the Great wrote:But like, if you don't want tracking cookies, write legislation about tracking cookies. Requiring a declaration regarding cookies on every single website is clearly useless. It does the exact opposite of the intended purpose.
Ah, there's the devil. What counts as "informedly"? What counts as "opting in"? How deep can you bury the naughty bits? How much can you hint (without saying) that your experience "won't be optimal" if you don't?x7eggert wrote:after the user informedly opted to allow you to do so
I was really speaking more generally about all the other methods sites use to track and profile you. (And I don't know what "banners" you are talking about.) Thing is, you can disable {tracking feature} in your browser, but then the web site probably won't work. So, take it or leave it.Eebster the Great wrote:You can't opt out of cookies.
I don't know what each site actually does or with whom, but potential ways include profiling me and reporting their findings to commercial entities, political entities, financial entities, investigative entities... whatever. None of these has my best interests in mind. Larger aggregation sites use this information to determine what I am permitted to (easily) see, and what they will make more difficult for me to find. Whoever controls what you read, controls what you think. Even if you and I are completely immune, the rest of the internet surely is vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. Editorial content can also be rewritten to better appeal to "me and my kind". I don't know if this is happening yet (I'm kind of surprised I haven't seen it), but it's certainly been possible for years. Word98 had a pretty amazing (and creepy) feature called "summarize"; you feed it a long document and it spits out a condensed Readers Digest version. It was quite impressive, and that was twenty years ago. Google Translate, with a few tweaks, could easily translate between, say, "type A personality English" and "type B personality English", to make certain articles and points of view more appealing to its target.Eebster the Great wrote:Also, how exactly do you think sites like Facebook "use [personal information] against you"?
ucim wrote:(And I don't know what "banners" you are talking about.)
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Eebster the Great wrote:Yeah, I'm sure this creates a barrier to entry, but it has also created multi-billion euro lawsuits immediately against large companies. It's bad for the big guys and worse for the small guys and a pain in the ass to consumers. It remains to be seen if it will do anything for protecting privacy.
Soupspoon wrote:Whether or not entirely GDPR related, I've just learnt how pervasive Facebook is. Just helped sign up someone of my acquaintance (I'm computer savvy, she isn't, and until now neither of us had wanted a Facebook login but she now 'needs' one, according to people in a society she's a member, to see information organised on the FB group) and we registered her with a plausible-but-fake pseudopseudonymical name, as per advice.
The shock she got (and me too, though I should know better) when it suggested possible friends to add who mostly were actual people we knew. There was no previous link with the (fake) name. We used a mobile number to register, not an email address that might have been in other people's scraped address-books. The links must have been made through machine profiling (web-bug footprints, etc) unless that mobile number was more widely available(/scrapable) than we thought. And, yet it was people from a whole different side of her social life than the one in which she was actually registering for.
Locked the account down to the max (a load of "Only me" settings, where possible, and "Only friends" where that is the most private option and one "Only friends of friends" for that one option that this is the most restrictive setting - still without yet defining any Friends) and sent a request to join the group, which I may need to unlock something slightly back open again when the request is approved.
Frankly, though, it made her extremely nervous of what was known about her (and convinced me that I'm doomed to be known about, anyway, but not enough to push me into making it official myself), and I'm going to have a good poke around in the "tell me what you know about me" options next time I'm given time to look at it and understand it all.
Indeed!
Soupspoon wrote:unless that mobile number was more widely available(/scrapable) than we thought.
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