*UPDATE, 2018-07-21*

These embarrassing little rants were posted in the heat of the moment. I
was pretty fed up at the time, because many web sites had put up long
disclaimers and lots of popups. And, yes, the general panic affected me
too.

What I failed to communicate is that I'm *not* blaming those web sites.

Nobody wants long disclaimers and popups like that. The users don't want
them and neither do webmasters. But the GDPR wants to ... kind of. More
or less. Maybe not. The GDPR is vague at times and there was a huge
scare in the media, so, well ... I guess you better show a really
obvious privacy notice, so you don't get into trouble. Something along
these lines. Some web sites even shut down completely.

In the case of <https://blog.v-gar.de>, it even turned out to just be a
temporary workaround, as the author has told me. It has long been fixed.

I was trying to criticize GDPR itself and the way it was introduced, not
the people who are required to implement it. I wasn't trying to say that
those webmasters are "idiots" (even though the text below may very well
sound that way). As I said above, I assumed that they were simply scared
or unsure what to do or needed a quick solution -- and I assume that
they did the best they could. All this was pretty clear in my mind, but
I failed to communicate it. Gah.

By the way, if you're not from Germany, go read up on the thing called
"Abmahnung". It adds some extra scary aspects.

Well then. There are several lessons to be learned. For me, it's once
again: Don't post emotional rants. :-)


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Dude, what the shit is happening to the web. Popups, popups everywhere.
Cookie notices everywhere. GDPR aaaaaaaaallllll over the place.

This is *really* annoying and it's going to backfire completely.

Take this private blog for example:

<https://blog.v-gar.de/>

Before you can see anything, you get a metric fuckton of text. If you
click, "no, please leave me alone", you will be redirected to some
german official department of "Datenschutz".

If you click, "yes, I read the privacy notice", there will be *another
two* popups with cookie notices.

And, of course, if your browser is configured not to store cookies
permanently, you'll get all this popup madness eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevery
damn time you visit these pages.

This is so ridiculous. No user will ever benefit from this. It just
makes all our lifes harder.

Oh, boy ...

Well, Gopher to the rescue. There won't be any popups in our little
world.


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Oh dude, this should be nominated for an award:

There are some RSS feeds out there, which -- you might have guessed it
-- redirect you to their privacy consent page! They fucking broke RSS to
show a privacy notice!

(Disclaimer: This is unrelated to that v-gar stuff above.)