WingNews

MaKey|4 months ago

> Using the internet in the UK/EU is such a horrible experience, every cookie pop-up is a reminder how badly thought out these rules are.

Technical cookies don't require any consent so every time you see a cookie banner the website owner wants to gather more data about you than necessary. Furthermore, these rules don't require cookie banners, it's what the industry has chosen as the way to get consent to track their users.

mnmalst|4 months ago

Or the website owner doesn't want to take the risk and ads a banner even if the site strictly doesn't need one.

smilingsun|4 months ago

It's very easy to make websites without needing cookie popups in EU/UK. Every cookie popup is a reminder of how stale the thinking around tracking and data sharing is!

user34283|4 months ago

If you do not use personalized advertising, I presume. Which may drop your ad revenue by somewhere between 20% and 60%.

scrlk|4 months ago

UK mobile networks and ISPs have had age-restricted content filtering enabled by default since ~2013-14.

This policy was pushed by David Cameron, who was the prime minister at the time:

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-internet-and-porn...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23401076

kypro|4 months ago

Some would argue the point is to be intrusive... The most cost effective and simplest solution to kids watching porn would be regulation around on-device filters. Why the UK didn't do this and instead tried to regulate the entire internet should be questioned – is this really about the children watching porn?

When purchasing an internet-enabled device the UK could regulate that large retailers must ask if the device is to be used by an under 18 year old. If they say yes, then they could ship with filters enabled. They could also regulate that all internet-enabled devices which could be sold to children should support child filters.

If we did this then whether or not a child views NSFW material it will be on the parent, instead of the current situation where whether a child can view NSFW material online depends on the age verification techniques of Chinese companies like TikTok or American companies like 4chan.

alias_neo|4 months ago

> then they could ship with filters enabled

All mobile network connections already come with content filters enabled in the UK, adult or not, and has to be explicitly disabled.

blacklion|4 months ago

I'm happy to have popups with "Reject All" button. If there is no "Reject All" button I close site immediately.

Cookie regulations are perfectly Ok, businesses which want to add 429 vendors and data processors to simple internet shop or corporate blog is not.

If you use cookies only for legitimate basic local functionality (like login and shopping cart on online shop site) you SHOULD NOT have any popups, there is exemption for such use cases in the regulations. Only if you want to sell data or pass it for processing to third party you need popup. Simply don't.

wiredfool|4 months ago

Having done several rounds with parental control, I'd say -- nfw. We were worried more about timesink than anything else, but over a long period of time, it mainly boils down to knowing your kids, trusting them, with checkups. The tech is just not there to actually control what happens on a device.

White listing worked for a while (months) when they were young, but it was super-high touch and stuff just broke all the time. You try to whitelist a site, but you have to then figure out all their CDNs.

Restricting specific sites works, sort of, until they find some place that hosts that content. Blocking youtube doesn't work(*), every search engine has a watch videos feature. (Why are you spending 3 hours a day on DDG?) There's really no way to segment youtube into "videos they need to watch for school" and "viral x hour minecraft playthrough". Somehow, we've managed to combine the biggest time waste ever with a somewhat useful for education hosting service.

That's leaving out the jailbreaks that come from finding an app's unfiltered webview and getting an open web escape there.

There's basically no reliable method for filtering even on locked down platforms.

* there's probably a way to kill it at the firewall based on dns, but that's iffy for phones and it's network wide.

jfim|4 months ago

It's totally doable to block YouTube with pihole, and also to make it blocked only on certain devices.

You can create groups and assign devices to them, and assign the block rules only to certain groups.

The only annoyance with this is that it blocks logging into Google since they redirect to YouTube to set a login cookie as part of the Google login process. If you're already logged into Google though, everything works as normal, and you can always disable pihole for five minutes if for some reason you got logged out and need to log back in.

Terr_|4 months ago

> The tech is just not there to actually control what happens on a device.

Neither is the tech for locking down all online identity to government-controlled access... But I have strong opinions about which one everybody should/shouldn't start creating!

snthd|4 months ago

Maybe they're called parental controls because they control the parents (by limiting and bundling choices).

PaulKeeble|4 months ago

Age restricted filtering of the internet is the default on all UK mobile networks as far as I know, it might even be the law that it defaults to filtering. You have to actually ring them up and say you want the filtering switched off or some do it as part of the sign up process.

All the routers also come with filtering settings as well and ISPs ship with the filtering on by default, since that is the law and has been for several decades.

blue_cookeh|4 months ago

It's generally just a toggle in the account settings so no need for a phone call, but yes. It is default-on when you take out a new broadband connection or mobile phone contract.

tryauuum|4 months ago

disgusting

my dream is when ISPs are allowed to sell this, but not allowed to call it internet access.

ceejayoz|4 months ago

> Using the internet in the UK/EU is such a horrible experience, every cookie pop-up is a reminder how badly thought out these rules are.

That's what the advertising-dependent implementers who deliberately made it shittier than necessary (stuff like "you have to decline each of our 847 ad partners individually") want you to think, at least. It's mostly malicious compliance.

mrguyorama|4 months ago

The funniest part of the banners is that most websites just buy a service from a third party to manage compliance, and some of those third party service providers have added "decline all" style buttons and one click solutions to all that use them, and are even friendly enough to save that choice in one of the "necessary" cookies.

But people (like my girlfriend) still click "Allow all" because they don't seem to realize that the legislation requires the website to still function if you decline unnecessary cookies!

The banner is literally an attempt to FOMO you into accepting cookies you never need to accept!

IMO the EU is somewhat in dereliction of Duty for not punishing cookie banner sites

GardenLetter27|4 months ago

The cookie popups is such a painful representation of Europe tech in general.

Like you can configure your browser to do whatever you want with cookies - blocking them all, blocking only third party ones, etc. - there is no need for government regulation here.

But the legislators are completely tech illiterate and even the general public supports more interference and regulation.

phba|4 months ago

The legislation simply says if you collect more data about your users than necessary, you must inform them and they must consent. This has nothing to do with cookies or any other tech.

The question a user should ask is why is this website collecting my data. Marketing and adtech companies are trying to shift this question to why is the EU making websites worse.

> there is no need for government regulation here

You don't need to care about this if you respect users' privacy in the same way you don't need to care about waste water regulation when you don't pump waste into rivers.

npteljes|4 months ago

No, that legislation is perfectly fine! It's the pesky websites who can't get their grubby hands off of private data. They could very well do away with some of the tracking, and have no popup at all, fully legally! But they all chose not to, and would rather annoy everyone with the pop-up.

I'd welcome a ramp-up of the legislation: outlaw the kind of tracking that needs the banners currently outright. I'm sure a lot of websites would just geo-block EU as a result (like how some did because of GDPR), but I bet the EU-compliant visitor tracking solutions would suddenly skyrocket, and overall, nothing of value would be lost, neither for the users, nor for the website administrators.

james_in_the_uk|4 months ago

It’s a bit of both.

It’s not possible to rely on browser controls as-is, because they do not differentiate between necessary and optional cookies.

Browser vendors could agree standards and implement them, exposing these to users and advertisers in a friendly way.

But they haven’t shown any interest in doing this.

I wonder why?

account42|4 months ago

The only ones who are tech illiterate are the ones still repeating this nonsense in 2025.

crtasm|4 months ago

Install uBlock. In its settings: Filter Lists -> Cookie notices

uyzstvqs|4 months ago

The simplest solution is to require all online devices to have a "child mode" that can be activated during setup, and require all parents to enable this for minors under 16. In this mode, the device takes screenshots every few seconds of active use, and makes this viewable on the parents' devices as a timeline. This must be private with full end-to-end encryption and limited data retention in the clients (7 days or so).

It's much simpler than blocking, and much more effective. Most parents don't know what to block proactively, blocklists are imperfect, and the biggest threats are hiding in the most innocent looking apps (Discord, Roblox, Reddit, even just messaging with friends from school).

account42|4 months ago

Yes, let's get kids used to surveillance from a young age. What could possibly go wrong.

Cthulhu_|4 months ago

Sure, but you'd need to apply it to all phones, because what's stopping a kid from buying an adult smartphone if they have the money? And smartphones can be dirt cheap.

Also remember that the pop-up is an industry choice, the rules only mandate that a user should opt in, not how. No laws mandate the cookie banners, no regulations say they should be obnoxious.

alias_neo|4 months ago

> Sure, but you'd need to apply it to all phones, because what's stopping a kid from buying an adult smartphone

There's no need, that's already the case.

All phones (the network account attached to the SIM actually, not the phone itself) comes with a content filter enabled by default in the UK, adult or not.

ajsnigrutin|4 months ago

> Sure, but you'd need to apply it to all phones, because what's stopping a kid from buying an adult smartphone if they have the money? And smartphones can be dirt cheap.

What's to stop that same kid to buy a porno dvd? Or to download a torrent of a porno? Or a porn magazine?

xxs|4 months ago

I suppose it'd be the same thing in the UK - kids cannot buy knives.

HPsquared|4 months ago

Come to think of it, parental control would be a neat application for something like Apple Intelligence. A local system service that is "trustworthy enough" to monitor everything on screen, and written content too.

Bender|4 months ago

Parental controls only need look for an RTA header [1] that would need to be legislated to be served from any adult or potentially adult user-generated content site. Not perfect, nothing is but it would take an intern maybe half a day to add the code to clients to check for said header. Adding the header on the server side is at trivial. Teens will bypass it as they can stream and watch together porn and pirated movies in rate-PG video games that allow defining a "movie player" but small children on locked down tablets would be fine.

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single

pr337h4m|4 months ago

This would enable/catalyze an order of magnitude more child abuse than anything that can happen on the worst cesspits of the internet.

Cthulhu_|4 months ago

Why Apple Intelligence when screen recording has been a feature for parental control systems for ages?

cedws|4 months ago

I hate that the internet is being destroyed in the name of iPad kids

skeezyjefferson|4 months ago

i love how screen time is only detrimental to young minds, and older minds are somehow immune to its evils.

unknown|4 months ago

[deleted]

preisschild|4 months ago

> Is there a solution where we can compel parental control to be enabled by default on kids phones?

What do you mean? Parents can easily set this up before they give them to their children.

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