10mo ago

Signal and Threema want nothing to do with WhatsApp

www.androidpolice.com /signal-threema-nothing-to-do-with-whatsapp-eu/

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What sort of irks me is what a mixed bag EU regulation is. Some is good (GDPR), not denying that. Some is annoying (you're going to be accepting cookies 100 times a day until you're dead thanks to them), and Whatsapp runs on all devices, so while interoperability nice, even as a free-software, Linux person I don't really care.
However, if you have to deal with friends or family in the US and you don't have an iPhone though, god help you. They don't care about this.
I guess my complaint is that EU regulation may seem legally elegant, but I think it is sometimes quite blind to the real situation on the ground.
It looks good on the books but we still, say, don't have a standard ARM boot process for smartphones that would help users not be dependent on whatever shitty ROM the OEM wants them to have. That would be life changing, but it will never even be talked about.
- I partially agree with you, and of course I hate those cookie banners, they're completely annoying.
  But please remember that it's not the EU's fault is every website is trying to violate your privacy.
  If websites weren't tracking everything you do, then cookie banners wouldn't be needed.
  I think we should collectively ask for websites to stop spying on us, not changing the cookie banners regulation.
  
  That's already a solution to cookie banners: the "do not track" setting. It's been tested in court in Germany and confirmed to count as rejected permission for GDPR purposes. Websites dinky have to obey it.
  It's currently slowly gaining traction, there's a privacy advocacy group suing high profile targets over this to create awareness.
  We also need a formal change to the cookie law/GDPR to acknowledge "do not track" as the preferred method. Then the banners will slowly go away.
  
  Yep, all the EU done is forced websites to have consent if the website want to process personal data. There are many analytics that does not process IP address or fingerprint and so does not require consent banner. Be annoyed on the websites, not this law.
  
  And yet we live in a world where consent spam is actually harder to deal with than tracking, if you're smart.
- The cookie consent also has a huge fail whale of unintended consequences - training users to click [accept], or really [anything], to make the annoyance just go away.
  And nefarious actors have their run of the place now. They can slip onerous terms into EULAs and know they will largely be accepted.
  As well as random [Continue] boxes to install malware or whatever they want since users are so well trained to click just to get it the fuck off their screen.
  
  That wont hold in court tho
- Wait and see what happens when Google removes traditional tracking from Chrome and every sites start requiring registration to access content !
  
  Right. That's a very different business model. I don't necessarily have an opinion about whether it would be better or worse. It is easier to look at our current problems and say it would be better. But, eh, I can block most trackers and be a leach off of websites that stay up by selling other people's data. shrug
- Whatsapp runs on all devices
  Nope. Android, iOS, Windows and Mac are not all devices. And web versions are far from ideal (some may suggest expanding web capabilities, but please don't).
  
  Mimimimimimimimimi
  
  If you have nothing to say, say nothing at all.
  
  Same to you, bud
- just get an extension and adblocker filters to automatically dismiss/block cookie dialogs and use an allowlist for sites from which you actually need to persist cookies in your browser's settings and set your browser to delete everything else on exit. With Firefox and browsers based on it you can, in addition to that, use container tabs (try sticky containers extension) for even better context isolation.
  
  Obviously. But that is very difficult on mobile.
  
  on Firefox if a desktop addon has no mobile version you can look up how to add custom add-ons collections when it comes to cookie prompt blockers, but ublock origin and adding filters to it work out of the box. Recently also some apps started showing cookie prompts with no option to decline unless you pay, if they can work offline, make them so
  
  Interesting. I'll check it out. I didn't know that.
  (BTW from my understanding of the law sites cannot block functionality if you decline cookies. But it is rarely enforced)

234 comments