this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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The Current System of Online Advertising has Been Ruled Illegal by The Belgian Court of Appeal. Advertising itself is Still Allowed, but not in a Way That Secretly Tracks Everyone’s Behavior. (www.bitsoffreedom.nl)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Pro@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
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From time to time, important news gets overshadowed by other headlines, even though it could have a profound impact on our (online) world. To most of us, few things are more bothersome than the dreaded cookie banners. On countless websites, you’re confronted with a pesky pop-up urging you to agree to something. You end up consenting without really knowing what it is. If you try to figure out what’s going on, you quickly get lost among the often hundreds of “partners” who want access to your personal data. Even if you do give your consent, it’s questionable whether you truly understand what you’re agreeing to.

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[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

A lot of those things are also required to render a webpage correctly.

[–] Gsus4@mander.xyz 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

But isn't most of that client-side processing? Can't I request a vanilla generic page and once it is in my browser to process it to shape it into the window size and extensions I want? Even if it is an adblocker: serve me the ad, I'll block it internally. But I suppose that for dynamic pages with js requests this would become hard to do.

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah it's Javascript that's the issue that can just take all this data in the client and send it wherever. And that's exactly what's happening.

[–] EchoSnail@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What's the solution?

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I'm not sure a technical solution is feasible, other than dns-blocking these trackers. I suppose lawmakers need to spring into action to make this shit illegal.

[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago

You could probably set a cap on how many different fingerprinty attributes a script is allowed to grab before requesting permission from the user.

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

That is indeed the solution.

A technical solution won't cut it. Here's a very convoluted example: the tag allows you to send the text "buy illegal drugs here" to kids!! Omg!!! What to do? Remove the tag? Obviously not. You ban the practice.