Funny, I tend to use larping for similar analogies. Not a huge insight or anything, just crossed my mind... I guess there's also overlap, or at least some kind of similarity with cargo cults, too? :)
EDIT: Trying to stay on topic and score some po--, cargo I mean...
Call it larping, being performative etc. but it is a concept as old as time. People emulate the interface of successful people without actually having the implementation of successful people.
In short, there are three core institutions, the "technocratic" European Commission, the European Parliament elected by direct popular vote, and the Council ("of the EU"/"of ministers") made up of the relevant (in terms of subject matter) ministers of the standing national govs. The law-making procedures depend on policy areas etc. but usually in the policy areas where EU is fully competent, the Commission — the democratically least accountable of the three bodies — by default makes the initiatives and negotiates/mediates them further along with the Parliament and Council, but only the last two together really have the power to finally approve actual legislation, usually either Regulations (directly applicable in member states as such — so an increasingly preferred instrument of near-full harmonisation), or Directives (requiring separate national transposition / implementation and usually leaving more room for national-level discretion otherwise as well).
While not fully comparable to nation-state parliaments, the powers of the EU Parliament have been strengthened vis-à-vis both the Commission and the Council, and it's certainly long been a misrepresentation to say that they, e.g., only have the power to "approve or turn down" proposals of the Commission and/or the Council.
Looks like you almost have this habit of explaining/talking about things 'as a European', particularly when bringing up USA in the context of international relations like now...
I guess it's OK — I'm European too, for example — but it does seem like you're doing it to imply that your views are somehow (at least relatively more) popular among, or representative of, well, Europeans. But now that we're making such massive generalisations, I'd claim that well-educated English-speaking Europeans are often likelier to be more familiar with the views and internal debates among Americans than those of many of their fellow Europeans, and that you're probably no exception.
As for your comment, had you not addressed it to 'you Americans', I'd be hard-pressed to tell it apart from a pretty standard-issue American Left (or 'Progressive') rant, perhaps somewhere from the younger and more identitarian part of that crowd, for example (despite some of the quasi-tankie undertones). While I'll admit that scoffing at things like pro-life policies and/or American poverty is certainly easier and more common throughout the political spectra in (Western) Europe, I'd say your cringe-inducing bothsidesism with USA and China falls closer to the crackpot left camp in Europe as well.
Europe contains multitudes, and undoubtedly for some but not all, up until now at least, it has been a bit too easy to comfortably observe and judge things for so long as a world-political bystander from under the US nuclear umbrella, typically further from the Russian border too — whether you were an insular French with casual contempt for all things 'Yankee', a German atomic-phobic pacifist (or worse, a far-right, Pro-Putin knuckle dragger) from that 'European powerhouse' heated with Russian non-renewables, or even a Swede from the world's leading moral superpower, or something like that, anyway... ;)
I'm pretty sure that if this passes, the EU Court of Justice will eventually find it more or less in violation with EU fundamental rights.
That will take time, though, so I guess they are either hoping that some impossibly secure, reliable and unerring technologies emerge in the meantime, or they are prepared for a forever battle with the Court, coming up with ever new adjustments as soon as previous schemes get struck down[1], meanwhile allowing European law enforcement agencies to keep testing, developing and iterating on whatever client-side scanning or other techno-legal approaches they may come up with. I think this was roughly what they — ie, basically a group of a dozen or two law enforcement reps from different member states agencies and ministries along with like one lonely independent information security expert — said themselves in some working group report as part of some kind of Commission roadmap thing presented by von der Leyen not too long ago.
[1] On the data protection side we've already seen this kind of perpetual movement through the years with respect to different “safeguarding” mechanisms made available to enable transfers of personal data to the US without too much hassle, from Safe Harbor through Privacy Shield to the current Data Privacy Framework.
I've looked at the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and don't see why this would violate it.
Both the right to privacy and the right to protection of personal data have exemptions for government. The right to private communications was modified by the ECHR to give an exemption for prevention of crime/protection of morals/etc.[1] and the right to protection of personal data exempts any legitimate basis laid down by law[2].
If you don't see it, it doesn't mean that it is not braking it.
They themselves even wrote it in the proposal - "Whilst different in nature and generally speaking less intrusive, the newly created power to issue removal orders in respect of known child sexual abuse material certainly also affects fundamental rights, most notably those of the users concerned relating to freedom of expression and information."
This proposal is de facto a mass communication surveillance of EU citizens.
Exactly as you mentioned every single member state and EU have laws that can for example issues a court order and seize your communication devices if you are braking a law for an investigation, there is no need for EU to have a law that first goes against the very essence of EU, second it also brakes I am pretty sure every single constitution of each different member states.
If this law passes you live in a totalitarian state and there is no excuse for that.
What's the point, then? The purpose of a document defining people's rights is to help ensure that governments don't trample those rights. If the government has explicit carve-outs to violate those rights, then the Charter isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
The ePrivacy Directive requires a (GDPR-level) consent for just placing the cookie, unless it's strictly necessary for the provision of the “service”. The way EU regulators interpret this, even web analytics falls outside the necessity exception and therefore requires consent.
So as long as the user doesn't and/or is not able to automatically signal consent (or non-consent) eg via general browser-level settings, how can you obtain it without trying to get it from the user on a per-site basis somehow? (And no, DNT doesn't help since it's an opt-out, not an opt-in mechanism.)
Everyone I know of will try to click "reject all unnecessary cookies", and you don't need the dialog for the necessary ones. You can therefore simply remove the dialog and the tracking, simplifying your code and improving your users' experience. Can tracking the fraction which misclicks even give some useful data?
My point was that according to the current interpretation, if they rely on cookies, user analytics (even simple visitor stats where no personal data is actually processed) are not considered "necessary" and are therefore not exempt from the cookie consent obligation under the ePrivacy Directive. The reason why personal data processing is irrelevant is that the cookie consent requirement itself is based on the pre-GDPR ePrivacy Directive which requires, as a rule, consent merely for saving cookies on the client device (subject to some exceptions, including the one discussed).
So you need a consent for all but the most crucial cookies without which the site/service wouldn't be able to function, like session cookies for managing signed-in state etc.
(The reason why you started to see consent banners really only after GDPR came to force is at least in part due to the fact that the ePrivacy Directive refers to the Data Protection Directive (DPD) for the standard of consent, and after DPD was replaced by GDPR, the arguably more stringent GDPR consent standard was applied, making it unfeasible to rely on some concept of implied consent or the like.)
User analytics that require cookies, sounds like tracking to me.
> like session cookies for managing signed-in state etc.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but are you saying that consent is required for session cookies? Because that is not the case, at all.
> (25) However, such devices, for instance so-called "cookies", can be a legitimate and useful tool, for example, in analysing the effectiveness of website design and advertising, and in verifying the identity of users engaged in on-line transactions. Where such devices, for instance cookies, are intended for a legitimate purpose, such as to facilitate the provision of information society services, their use should be allowed on condition that users are provided with clear and precise information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC about the purposes of cookies or similar devices so as to ensure that users are made aware of information being placed on the terminal equipment they are using. Users should have the opportunity to refuse to have a cookie or similar device stored on their terminal equipment. This is particularly important where users other than the original user have access to the terminal equipment and thereby to any data containing privacy-sensitive information stored on such equipment. Information and the right to refuse may be offered once for the use of various devices to be installed on the user's terminal equipment during the same connection and also covering any further use that may be made of those devices during subsequent connections. The methods for giving information, offering a right to refuse or requesting consent should be made as user-friendly as possible. Access to specific website content may still be made conditional on the well-informed acceptance of a cookie or similar device, if it is used for a legitimate purpose.
You should inform users about any private data you would be storing in a cookie. But this can be a small infobox on your page with no button.
When storing other type of information, the "cookie" problem needs to be seen from the perspective of shared devices. You know, the times before, when you might forget to log out at an internet cafe or clear your cookies containing password and other things they shouldn't. This is a dated approach at looking at the problem (most people have their own computing devices today, their phone), but still applicable (classrooms, and family shared devices).
The cookie consent provision under the ePrivacy Directive doesn't care whether they're first- or third-party. Actually, the way it's been worded, you'd arguably need a consent for (strictly non-"necessary") use of eg local storage, too — afaik this hasn't really come up in regulatory practice or case law, but may be more due to regulators' modest technical expertise or priorities.
A conceptually different matter altogether is consent (possibly) needed under GDPR for various kinds of personal data processing involving the use of cookies (ie not just the placement of cookies as such) and other technologies for tracking, targeting and the like. That's why you see cookie banners with detailed purposes and eg massive lists of vendors (since they can be considered "recipients" of the user's personal data under GDPR). In this context, a valid consent (and the information you have to provide to obtain it) is required (at least) when consent is the only feasible legal basis of the ones available under Art 6 GDPR for the personal data processing activities in question. This is where the national regulators have taken strict stances especially regarding ad targeting and other activities usually involving cross-site tracking, for example, deeming that the only feasible basis for those activities would be consent (ie "opt-in") — instead of, in particular, "legitimate interests" which would enable opt-out-like mechanisms instead. This is the legal context of looking critically at 3rd-party cookies, but unfortunately, for the reasons mentioned above, getting rid of such cookies might still not be enough to avoid the minimal base cookie consent requirement when you use eg analytics... :(
It's pretty ridiculous, I know, and it's a bummer they scrapped the long-planned and -negotiated ePrivacy Regulation which was meant to replace the old ePrivacy Directive and, among other things, update the weird old cookie consent provision.
Tsk, tsk! You're using thorn (ð) for two different 'th' sounds. Old English used 'eth' (þ) to mark both sounds but it'd be more precise to use both letters like in Icelandic, eg for the above: þings, ðe (although the vowel in 'the' is actually more of a schwa [ǝ] usually, or [i] before vowels). Also, you're still sticking to some English spelling pecularities there...
In a fictitious modern, phonology-based spelling system, you could write the above something like:
“Bat sač þings gou in sajkls, änd wan dej ðí Ingliš längwidž wil bí simplifajd.”
Interesting, in my accent the "th" in "the" and the "th" in "things" sound the same.
Accents do make spelling reform difficult. For example, some of the people who grew up 5 miles from me (they were Cosham/Portsmouth, I was south Havant) pronounced both these "th"s as… I don't know the linguistic symbol, but something like a "v" or an "f".
Yeah, accents, dialects, preserving history and mutual intelligibility by retaining old or original forms of spelling or otherwise... Lots of reasons for being conservative here.
What's your accent btw? In "standard" English, 'the' has a voiced consonant, whereas 'thing' is unvoiced.
EDIT: Sorry, I now see you already told about your regional accent.
Other than the specific location and the social category of "upper-middle-class", I don't know how to describe my accent. People at school thought I was posh, but I never saw myself that way.
Now I live in Berlin, so I might have started picking up a bit of a German accent (and perhaps an ESL accent if there is such a thing).
Disagree on almost all points. Glass and the relative absence of color, texture and patterns make it look cold, detached, almost inhuman and absent of anything your eyes could rest on. There are ways to make this approach look cool and futuristic, but it suffers from the same downside as a lot of the white/glassy modernist architecture: the human eye abhors lack of detail and natural/organic patterns and texture. (It makes for a great canvas for graffitti though...)
Meanwhile, Android's Material You/Expressive design language is taking almost an opposite approach. Personally, I prefer it to Liquid Glass by a wide margin.
Architecture without structural integrity is terrible no matter how it looks. User interfaces that aren't usable and clear are bad no matter how they look. Sure the human eye enjoys looking at trees with thousands of leaves, but you won't find a person who enjoys a UI with a thousand buttons on screen.
To me visual noise in user interfaces is a severe distraction and I tend to prefer applications with minimal UIs (not minimal features). I disabled text cursor blinking in the browser and use a program to auto-hide the mouse pointer after a few seconds because it can distract me from reading.
I do like this new UI Apple shows here, though I would probably get tired of the effects if I had to use it for extended periods of time. Just like animations look satisfying until you realize they slow down everything you do on the computer because often their main purpose is marketing and not usefulness.
I think you Americans should stick to calling this group as liberals or move to progressives where appropriate (identity politics, woke "ideology" etc.), and leave "left" to those who can still perceive it as a somewhat coherent concept in their politics (although perhaps every day less so). What I mean is just that if you toned down their woke/progressive evangelism and posing, the Democrats would be a firmly center-right party in large parts of western and central continental Europe, for example.
This is just a no-true-scotsman though. The term “left”, whilst representing an extreme generalization, means just as much (or as little) in the US as it does continental Europe, or any other western democracy.
yes, of the groups left, center, and right, it means those left of center, regardless of party
currently the Democratic party best represents "center" for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because their platform better represents most Americans (but not the ones on the right or left) than that of another major parry platform
I get the problem. Wouldn't say it applies equally to other outlets. RT is very specifically a single-state propaganda tube, while a lot of Western press could perhaps be characterized as vaguely Atlanticist and pretty pro-globalization. But I'm not sure whether this was what you meant exactly by power centers.
Would they need more categories, then? Like geo-political orientation and state influence (although the latter would often be close to the press freedom rating)?
I meant more like the democratic party (new york times), republican party (fox), the national security establishment (washington post).
This is still too vague even, I think and there are probably complex sub-centres of power (e.g. factions within the democrats) and alliances (e.g. the neocon/democratic party nexus) reflected as well.
All of this gets airbrushed over by the traditional left/right continuum.
It's critically important too, coz it definitely drives both what is reported and how it's selectively presented and is a better predictor than an arbitary left/right designation.
EDIT: Trying to stay on topic and score some po--, cargo I mean...