The word cancelled has lost all meaning.
Which was their goal
Cancelling has been cancelled
…says a cunty website that won’t let me refuse cookies with one click
They’re all just as bad as meta. Click on “manage options” and see how many times these fuckers are selling your data 😡
Who the fuck is upvoting this
LGF’s policy is one of the most upfront and protective ones I’ve ever seen, second only to something like Pluralistic or other sites which simply don’t do ads. Maybe I’m missing something, but it looks like they make it clear they run Google Ads which require cookies, tell you how to opt out of the data collection on Google’s side, and promise not to leak your information to anyone except Google.
Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on the site.
Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.
We may contract with third-party service providers to assist us in better understanding our site visitors. These service providers are not permitted to use the information collected on our behalf except to help us conduct and improve our business.
We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information. This does not include trusted third parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or servicing you, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential.
Whether you believe their privacy policy is a separate issue, but if you’re gonna pick out someone’s privacy policy to call cunty and complain about, this is about the last one I would do it to.
Who the fuck is upvoting this
People with consumer rights
It’s a requirement in the EU to be able to refuse all cookies within a couple of clicks. This website should either not load in the EU, or have a “refuse” button
I guess I can buy the idea that they’re breaking the letter of the EU law, but isn’t the EU cookie law widely acknowledged to be a fairly silly attempt to protect users’ privacy in terms of the reality of its implementation? Maybe I am wrong about that and there is a substantive benefit to allowing users to ask the web site to reject all cookies, that’s just my impression.
The point that I’m making is that their policy seems like it’s actually constructed to protect its users’ privacy, which makes it an outlier in the positive direction and makes criticism of it on this basis come off and weird and mean-spirited and not accurate.
By way of contrasting example, I picked a random other story which you’d commented on recently without feeling the need to call them cunty, and saw this notice when it’s accessed from the EU:
Your Privacy Rights Penske Media Corporation (PMC) uses first and third-party technologies to enable PMC and third-parties to collect information about you and your interactions with our sites and services (including clicks, cursor movements and screen recordings). Learn more HERE. By continuing to use our sites or services, you agree to our Terms of Use (including the class action waiver and arbitration provisions) and Privacy Policy, which have recently changed.
… which sounds a lot more status-quo to how most modern web sites behave than does LGF’s notice.
And that site has the “reject all” button right away like it should have.
Where? Totally separate from tracking your mouse clicks and browser fingerprint and whatever and reserving the right to sell it to third parties being a way bigger privacy violation than having no way to refuse site-operational cookies, I also don’t see any “reject all” button.
Definitely has the “reject all” button for me
Have you checked your consumer rights? 😂
No idea what you’re asking me
The EU’s privacy laws don’t require a cookie dialog. It’d be legal and a way better user experience to make tracking opt-in and move the setting to some configuration menu somewhere else.
websites that serve users in the EU need to allow you to decline cookies, not just tell you about the fact they use them. this website is actually breaking EU privacy law, it’s definitely not what a European user would consider protective
I upvoted it. I don’t think it’s literally just as bad as meta, but I still think it’s bad. Websites should let you opt out of cookies in one click. If they don’t, I prefer not to use them. I’m sure this website’s article is very important, but if they want their journalism to be read they should present it in a respectful manner. Otherwise I’m just reading the headline. I like the headline, it’s a good headline, it will inform my views going forward. I will not read the article and I will not give them ad traffic.
“They’re all just as bad as meta”
Lol if only you knew what meta have and do with that data
Hi, I’m Lemmy BadTakes! You may remember me from such films as “Biden’s exactly the same as Trump” and “Sure Russia’s a homicidal one-party kleptocracy where questioning the leader means prison and challenging him means death. But the United States has racist police and wealth inequality, which is actually far worse!”
If you continue using our website, we’ll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on this website.
You literally have an “x” button in the top-right of your web browser (or similar exit feature if you’ve disabled or moved that).
Or, you can use a browser or plugin which blocks a fairly-accurate blacklist of ad tracking cookies, and not involve the sites’ dubious assurances that they’ll respect your requests for privacy into the equation at all. That seems like a way, way better way. If you want to go past that I would just configure the browser to reject cookies except from a whitelist of sites you trust, and still not involve the site’s assurances into it.
I think the EU overall does a great job at doing consumer protection and I think the “you gotta have a cookie dialog” is one isolated aspect where the law does nothing but create hassle for everyone involved, but I don’t really know; that’s just my uninformed opinion.
Oh, here we go. “Companies have no responsibility to use safe practices, every user should just go to the trouble of installing special tools to personally opt out of data mining.”
Do you know what the danger of data mining actually is? It’s not that companies will advertise the perfect bra for your cup size. It’s that they’ll use it to influence politics. You might not know this, but Meta has actually been implicated in dangerous use of data alongside an organisation called Cambridge Analytica in experiments designed to influence elections. They may have had a hand in Donald Trump’s presidency. If you have big enough data, you can effect random changes like making a certain page load half a second slower, and watch the impact on people’s political habits. If you bring those experiments to their conclusion, you will be able to use imperceptibly subtle influences to decide elections. You won’t have to buy a senator anymore, you can pick which one people will vote for.
“Oh just use your technical skills to opt out of tracking”, that’s not why I’m scared of tracking. I’m scared of tracking because it could have my illiterate next door neighbour voting for the Trans Genocide party. My illiterate next door neighbour isn’t going to install anti tracking software. These laws exist for a reason. You have to protect EVERYONE from manipulation if you want to protect anyone. You can’t just protect the smart people with the computer skills, you have to think about the effect that each tiny thing will have on the dumbest people in society.
2004: The Internet is going to lead us into a utopian future of free communication where we exchange ideas with each other without corporate media being gatekeepers telling us what to read, write and think!
2024: Hi, I’m Meta and everyone gets their information from my platforms and I can decide what ideas to allow there. What do you mean we weren’t supposed to have that anymore by now, whoever told you that kind of nonsense.
When Netscape Navigator’s initial announcement post went out, people were alarmed about the idea that someone might be trying to charge money for software related to the internet. Some people questioned if it was legal to even do that, since the supporting software, backbone, and all the content were freely created by other people – it was basically at that point a 100% non commercial environment.
Things have changed
I am too young to remember that. Of course browsers are now free (at least as in beer, many also as in speech) again and that is a good thing. In my childhood, computers were pretty much synonymous with Windows and the web was mostly unusable without Flash Player and it’s a good thing that that has changed. Still, we don’t live in the utopian society I imagined the Internet would lead to.
Which is funny because Meta has wanted to avoid the “information arbiter” label to avoid the regulations it would inevitably impose.
But I guess no company can resist eating the cake once they have it.
It’s not surprising. Don’t use their platform.
Nick Heer wrote intelligently about this.
Hard disagree with this person.
They’re position basically boils down to “Facebook won’t tell us what problems were identified with the domains that caused the blocks, but it’s better to have guards against malicious domains than not”. That is a false dichotomy.
A better response is, “unless Facebook is actually disclosing what issues with the domains caused the flagging, we should not allow them to block news websites, especially when they’ve been critical of Facebook”. To do otherwise is basically just giving them carte blanche to block domains whenever they want to, and assuming on their behalf that they’re being honest and benevolent.
They go on to make excuses for Meta all throughout the article:
Whatever issue Facebook flagged regarding those ads — Kendall is not clear, and I suspect that is because Facebook is not clear either
While this interpretation of a deliberate effort by Facebook to silence critical reporting is kind of understandable, given its poor communication and the lack of adequate followup, it hardly strikes me as realistic.
For an even simpler example, consider how someone forgetting a password for their account looks exactly the same as someone trying to break into it. On any website worth its salt, you will be slowed down or prevented from trying more than some small number of password attempts, even if you are the actual account owner. This is common security behaviour; Meta’s is merely more advanced.
As someone who works in security, this is actually a hilarious indictment of how inadvanced Facebook’s security would have to be to be mistaking actual organic shares and reposts with malicious boosting attempts, and once again is assuming innocence on their behalf where no assumption of innocence is warranted.
Even their sarcastic line,
If you wanted to make a kind-of-lame modern conspiracy movie
is an unwarranted dismissal of assertions that Meta polices political content on their platforms as being akin to a conspiracy, even though we in fact know they do that. Reporting has shown that Meta does actively take political stances and translate those into actions and policies in their sites.
Hanlon’s Razor is about assumptions sans evidence, because of the natural human tendency to automatically interpret actions that harm you as intentional. It’s not, however, meant to discount evidence of patterns of malicious behavior by actors known to be problematic.
And this is not a new, one-off behavior on Facebook’s part:
The climate divide: How Facebook’s algorithm amplifies climate disinformation - Feb2022
Facebook did not label over 50% of posts from top climate change deniers, says new report - Feb2022
Facebook’s New Ad Policies Make It Harder for Climate Groups to Counter Big Oil - Mar2022
I can’t tell if the author thinks Facebook’s security is advanced, or incompetent.
Thank you
The writer also totally skips over, as far as I can tell, the escalating series of blocks of additional outlets who were covering the story. With each additional one, it becomes geometrically less likely that it was just the kind of mistake he is claiming is a plausible explanation (which, he then parlays into arguing that it means it is the plausible explanation).
Interesting take. You’ve certainly got me thinking about it a bit more.
I won’t try to interpret the author’s intent because that’s for him to do and I don’t want to speak on his behalf. But I do think he’s right about the tone of the response to the error being wildly wrong. News orgs should be dispassionate and I don’t get a sense that they were at all.
I think Meta fucks up. I think mass media is terrible at understanding what they’re reporting about. I think conservatives in particular see boogie men everywhere. Anyway, I’d read Nick’s piece earlier in the day and that had been my only exposure to the story, so I chose to link to it because to me it was a reasonable response.
This is a well written and a very rational take on the situation. Nick is probably right.
Nice try, Nick.
Reminder that the majority of social media are private companies and not the street.
However, they are monopolies, and should be treated as such.
So…mercilessly incinerated to a pile of ashes?
