You only start to need the popups if you specifically put cookies on a visitor's browser to build a personal profile of them.
This can be for e.g. sales acquisition or marketing engagement, but also includes cookies to simplify login, so not everything is "stupid stuff." A cookie that stores "was here, skip the splash page" may already fall afowl, if you put any session metadata in it.
"People are forced into extensions, just to stop wasting their time here."
Except, what actually has happened is that the annoying pop-ups became ubiquitous, and then relatively standardized, so that now an extension like Consent-o-Matic (because the browser companies don't want to upset their advertisers) can automate away your actual choices.
If you want to allow websites to track you, tell the extension to make those choices. If you don't, then tell the extension that. It does a great job almost instantly clearing the popups, and you have more control over your digital identity.
The regulatory frameworks in the EU are intentionally not designed like the US, to maximize company profits over e.g. human rights and health.
It is thoroughly documented that social media and the modern web are designed to be addictive, by psychologists who specialize in this. We regulate access to other addictive things, because addictive things break humans' normal control systems.
> "the farther you get from the influence of bureaucrats, the happier life becomes"
only when things are "normal" and if you're a default power-holder in a community. For everyone else, really no.
I remember having some kind of a shell app on my iPod Touch in college and needing to run and find wifi a few times to troubleshoot something at a job I was student working at.
The prevailing implementation of capitalism compels all companies to continue developing revenue streams to increase their overall “worth.”
Any company that has unique or rare data is compelled to do things with it. Those that don’t either can’t figure out how or explicitly reject the reward function of contemporary capitalism. We should really expect those deviations to be the exception.
When we let the market bubble-up protective conditions through buyer behavior, we advantage innovation at the cost of accepting more harms, because the market response is always reactive instead of proactive, and the reaction can sometimes take decades or more (like GHG emissions and global warming).
When we let structural regulations assert protective conditions on a market, we try to advantage proactive harm reduction at the cost of innovation, because artificial market limitations will be barriers to innovation and create secondary game conditions that advantage some players.
Which way we lean should depend on the type and severity of potential harms, especially with consideration of how permanent or non-reversible those harms are.
This can be for e.g. sales acquisition or marketing engagement, but also includes cookies to simplify login, so not everything is "stupid stuff." A cookie that stores "was here, skip the splash page" may already fall afowl, if you put any session metadata in it.
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