Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/25/why-are-creators-paying-for-ti.html
…
2 Likes
“It’s easy if you try.”
Not to minimize the bullshittiness of the situation, but there you go. If it’s not yours, no matter how much time and effort you invest in it, when all is said and done… it’s not yours. You’re at the mercy of vagaries and whims of outside forces, per usual.
5 Likes
Oh darn. Now I’ll have to go to Youtube for my videos of middle schoolers dancing around in their bedrooms.
2 Likes
Creators are paying for a meddling government’s mistake, not TikTok’s. Just like we all pay for some other meddling government’s mistake now that every damn website needs to do a DHTML popup to tell us about the cookie technology that has existed for decades. They have never done a single non-fucked thing to the Internet, and yet people clammor for more of it.
GDPR would mean that they’d have to make it easy and prompt to fix an incorrect DOB, and they’d have to explain why they needed it.
4 Likes
Actual footage of TikTok deleting videos.
11 Likes
I’m sure that’s how GDPR has been marketed. Give it a year or two to see the emergent behaviors.
I, uh, don’t think the Library of Alexandria exactly burned here…
1 Like
“Restore their accounts”
Wait, what? Did tiktok delete the things - as required - or not?
Or you could just look at how the EU handled data protection for the period between 1995 to 2018 given that it is essentially exactly the same thing.
No, you pay for that because “every damn website” refuses to spend the time it would take to think about what cookies they use, which ones they actually need and whether they need your consent or not. It’s easier for them to do an end-run around what they’re supposed to do and just tell you “We use cookies, we use a bunch of them, says yes or fuck off.”
2 Likes
LOL… so you appreciate that law? You enjoy that popup on every website? Perhaps the politicians were well-meaning, but they were complete morons who acted outside of their spheres. If you want to control cookies, there’s browser settings and add-ons for that. You manage your own consent with your web client. Government interference always delivers the opposite of helpful change. Here’s another: remember the media/politician frenzy about “cybersquatting” and how we so very much needed a law about it? The law that was passed allowed corporates to steal whateversucks.com from people, while doing zilch to stop speculative buy-up and squatting of every word combination possible. But please, keep begging for more laws to attack the Internet.
That made me laugh. Thank you.
Not particularly. I do think the law itself is not outrageous. Until it was passed, I can assure you that the average user didn’t have a clue what cookies were, what they did or whether or how they could control them or whether they should want to.
Most still don’t; not because of the law but because people who are supposed to comply with it - and I think asking someone before you put shit on their machine is about the minimum one can expect- choose not to comply with it properly.
Morons maybe but I’ll disagree with you about the rest. Regulating, passing laws is their sphere. It is exactly what they are there for.
You presumably have some vision of government which just sits there, maybe organising an army from the feudal levies every now and again to ward off invasion; maybe intervening to enforce a dispute resolution mechanism for corporate entities now and then but otherwise doing nothing.
Fair enough but I’m not interested.
Sounds like their attempt to comply was a little… hit or miss
Never heard of TikTok and for all I know they’re a classic EvilCorp, but, just assuming for a moment that they’re not… I gotta admit a smidgeon of sympathy for companies that may have started small, providing a fun product, then grown fast and found themselves facing issues like this.
Scaling big software solutions can be HARD, and it may have been that $5.7m fine wiped out a lot of their capacity to implement the new features demanded by the FTC, or at least to implement them well. I know if I was a CTO (haha, the very idea!) and that landed on me, I’d be freaking out. YMMV.
(Oh, and as you can guess, I didn’t RTFA)
In my experience the key problem with GDPR is that when you click the button to check what companies want to put cookies on your machine, so you can refuse to collect advertising cookies, there are about 300 similarly named crappy programmatic advertising companies listed, and you have to click them off one at a time because there isn’t a “refuse all” button. You start clicking, and find that some of them won’t click off and instead tell you to come back later, due to some vague technical reason, but when you do come back later they just tell you to come back later again.
So in the end, you just give up and accept all, and wipe your cookies every few days.
It would be better to build an auto-cookie-wiper into browsers, with some timer settings so it would run every week or whatever.
The funny thing is that they already ask to put shit on your machine, and your browser says yes or no on your behalf, based on your chosen settings and your chosen software. This is the user’s responsibility. Same with any other software.
You’re advocating that users remain uninformed and uninvolved, and the nanny state should override the protocols of the Internet, or at least add ill-designed, ill-thought-out layers of crap on top of those protocols. I do indeed believe that is not the place of government, and that’s clearly where we disagree. I just boggle that people earnestly want the government acting in this sphere, when it would be just as easy to advocate the use of better software or user education on how to use the software already available, especially given the existing results of government interference.
I like the concept of jurisdiction with limits. I like the idea of governments providing decent common infrastructure for a decent standard of living, where other systems cannot do as well, and otherwise staying well the hell out of areas where they do not belong. This is the opposite of “please make laws for everything!” Perhaps I’m a radical for having that thought.
My point precisely 
You can of course do this.
Apart from the ones that don’t let you wipe them.
Also just as a technical point I have to make because I am that kind of person, the cookie stuff is not strictly speaking GDPR. It has it’s own specific electronic privacy directive.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32002L0058:EN:HTML
The GDPR is as the name suggests, general.
Those who don’t like the e-privacy directive (@PathogenAntifre) can rejoice/despair as they are apparently working on a new one to sit alongside the GDPR.
I will rejoice when there is a massive rollback of government interference vs. new layers… LOL. I know I’ll be waiting a few minutes.
1 Like
I am not. I am expressly advocating that users should be informed and involved. The user’s software being involved is not the same.
And reasonable as you may think your views are - when phrases like “the nanny state” get trotted out in earnest is when all sensible folk know that further discussion is pointless.
And it’s the definitions of those areas that is always so difficult.
We clearly have very different views of what they are for example. Which is fair enough.
It is interesting that it’s the poor old cookies who get all the attention when it comes to the e-privacy directive.
