No To Spy Pixels
Almost no-one has given informed constent to being tracked through spy pixels in emails, and yet the practice is endemic. This is wrong. It needs to change.
Link tags: gdpr
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Bunny Fonts | Explore Faster & GDPR friendly Fonts
A drop-in replacement for Google Fonts without the tracking …but really, you should be self-hosting your font files.
The web is overrun and pop-up blockers haven’t worked in years
The technical challenge in blocking modern pop-ups is bigger than the pop-ups of the past decades. However, it’s long overdue that web browsers step up and act to protect their users’ interests. Pop-ups, pop-overs, interstitials, modal dialogs, whatever you want to call them! It’s time to ban them from the web again! At least immediately after a page load.
Is Momentum Shifting Toward a Ban on Behavioral Advertising? – The Markup
I really hope that Betteridge’s Law doesn’t apply to this headline.
‘Like an atomic bomb’: So what now for the IAB’s GDPR fix after regulator snafu? - Digiday
Simply put, the popups asking people for consent whenever they land on a site are illegal.
Using Google Fonts Breaches GDPR – Interdependent Thoughts
Remember when I said you should avoid third-party dependencies?
Google, Facebook hiding behind skirts of small business
While the dream of “personalized” ads has turned out to be mostly a nightmare, adtech has built some of the wealthiest companies in the world based on tracking us. It’s no surprise to me that as Members of the European Parliament contemplate tackling these many harms, Big Tech is throwing millions of Euros behind a “necessary evil” PR defense for its business model.
But tracking is an unnecessary evil.
Even in today’s tracking-obsessed digital ecosystem it’s perfectly possible to target ads successfully without placing people under surveillance. In fact right now, some of the most effective and highly valued online advertising is contextual — based on search terms, other non-tracking based data, and the context of websites rather than intrusive, dangerous surveillance.
Let’s be clear. Advertising is essential for small and medium size businesses, but tracking is not.
Rather than creating advertising that is more relevant, more timely and more likable we are creating advertising that is more annoying, more disliked, and more avoided.
I promise you, the minute tracking is outlawed, Facebook, Google and the rest of the adtech giants will claim that their new targeting mechanisms (whatever they turn out to be) are superior to tracking.
UK ICO: surveillance advertising is dead
Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.
Tracking-industry body IAB Europe told that it has infringed the GDPR, and its “consent” pop-ups used by Google and other tech firms are unlawful. - Irish Council for Civil Liberties
Google and the entire tracking industry relies on IAB Europe’s consent system, which has now been found to be illegal.
Doc Searls Weblog · How the cookie poisoned the Web
Lou’s idea was just for a server to remember the last state of a browser’s interaction with it. But that one move—a server putting a cookie inside every visiting browser—crossed a privacy threshold: a personal boundary that should have been clear from the start but was not.
Once that boundary was crossed, and the number and variety of cookies increased, a snowball started rolling, and whatever chance we had to protect our privacy behind that boundary, was lost.
The Doctor is incensed.
At this stage of the Web’s moral devolution, it is nearly impossible to think outside the cookie-based fecosystem.
Some long-winded thoughts on privacy policies and consent popups — Piper Haywood
A deep dive into GDPR.
Got Google Analytics on your site? You should probably read this.
Cookie Consent Speed.Run
My current score is one minute and 18 seconds. Can you beat it?
Global Privacy Control — Take Control Of Your Privacy
This sounds a lot like Do Not Track …but looking at the spec, the interesting part is the way that this is designed to work in combination with legal frameworks. That’s smart. I don’t think a purely technical solution is workable (as we saw with Do Not Track).
Simple Analytics - Simple, clean, and privacy-friendly analytics
Another nice alternative to Google Analytics with a focus on privacy.
Why The Web Is Such A Mess - YouTube
Tom gives a succinct history of the ongoing arms race between trackers and end users.
Plausible Analytics | Simple, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics
Another alternative to Google Analytics—nice and lightweight too!
Measuring Performance behind consent popups – Simon Hearne
- Opted out experiences are ~35% faster
- Opting in downloads 2.5MB of additional JavaScript
- Opted in repeat views are twice as slow as opted out
How Ireland became Europe’s data watchdog - BBC News
The coming GDPR storm:
Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, Helen Dixon, is expected to circulate her decisions on some cases by July or August, with final rulings made by the end of the year.
(That’s my sister-in-law, that is.)
Consently - Privacy-friendly and GDPR compliant tracking
This looks very useful: a script that will allow visitors to tailor which tracking scripts they want to allow. Seems like a win-win to me: useful for developers, and useful for end users. A safe and sensible approach to GDPR.
New Privacy Rules Could Make This Woman One of Tech’s Most Important Regulators - The New York Times
It’s kind of surreal to see a profile in the New York Times of my sister-in-law. Then again, she is Ireland’s data protection commissioner, and what with Facebook, Twitter, and Google all being based in Ireland, and with GDPR looming, her work is more important than ever.
By the way, this article has 26 tracking scripts. I don’t recall providing consent for any of them.