Yes, This Site Uses Cookies, Because Nearly All Sites Use Cookies, And We're Notifying You Because We're Told We Have To

from the even-though-it's-silly dept

If you're visiting our site today (and I guess, forever into the future if you don't click "got it") you will now see a notification at the bottom of the site saying that this site uses cookies. Of course, this site uses cookies. Basically any site uses cookies for all sorts of useful non-awful, non-invasive purposes. We use cookies, for example, to track your preferences (including when you turn off ads on the site, which we let you do for free). In order to make sure those ads are gone, or whatever other preferences stay in place, we use cookies.

For the last few years, of course, you've probably seen a bunch of sites pop up boxes "notifying" you that they use cookies. For the most part, this has to do with various completely pointless EU laws and regulations that probably make regulators feel good, but do literally nothing to protect your privacy. Worst are the ones that suggest that by continuing on the site you've made some sort of legal agreement with the site (come on...). These cookie notification pop ups do not help anyone. They don't provide you particularly useful information, and they don't lead you to a place that is more protective of your actual privacy. They just annoy people, and so people ignore them, leave the site, or (most commonly) just "click ok" to get the annoying bar or box out of the way to get to the content they wanted to see in the first place.

Here's the stupendously stupid thing about all of this: you are already in control. If you don't like cookies, your browser gives you quite a lot of control over which ones you keep, and how (and how often) you get rid of them. Some browsers, like Mozilla's Firefox Focus browser, automatically discard cookies as soon as you close a page (it's great for mobile browsing, by the way). Of course, that leads to some issues if you want to remain logged in on certain pages, or to have them remember preferences, but for those you can use a different browser or change various settings. It's nice that the power to handle cookies is very much up to you. We here at Techdirt like it when the control is pushed out to the ends of the network, rather than controlled in the middle.

But, because it makes some privacy regulators feel like they've "done something", they require such a pointless "cookie notification" on sites. Recently, one of our ad providers told us that we, too, needed to include such a cookie notification, or else we'd lose the ability to serve any ads from Google, who (for better or for worse) is one of the major ad providers out there. We did not get a clear explanation for why we absolutely needed to add this annoying notification that doesn't really help anyone, but the pleas were getting more and more desperate, with all sorts of warnings. We even asked if we could just turn off the ads entirely (which would, of course, represent something of a financial hit) and they seemed to indicate that because we still use other types of cookies (again, including cookies to say "don't show this person any ads"), we had to put up the notification anyway.

The last thing we were told is that if we didn't put up a cookie notification within a day, Google would "block us globally." I'm honestly not even sure what this means. But, either way, we're now showing you a cookie notification. It's silly and annoying and I don't think it serves your interests at all. It serves our interests only inasmuch as it gets our partner to stop bugging us. Don't you feel better?

You can click "got it" and make it go away. You can not click it and it will stay. You can block cookies in your browser, or you can leave them. You can toss out your cookies every day or every week (not necessarily a bad practice sometimes). You're in control. But we have to show you the notification, and so we are.

Filed Under: advertising, control, cookie notification, cookies, eu, preferences, privacy, privacy theater, silly pointless regulations, silly regulations
Companies: techdirt

Ring Updates Privacy Dashboard Again, Allows Users To Preemptively Block All Law Enforcement Requests For Footage

from the 'get-a-warrant'-functionality dept

After months of negative publicity, Ring is finally taking a few small steps towards not being completely awful. The company clearly would rather be a government contractor than a supplier of consumer products, but has repeatedly gotten in its own way by selling products to consumers rather than surveillance tech to government agencies.

Trying to have it all, Ring welcomed police departments into the fold, offering steep discounts on cameras to agencies that played along with its PR pitches and distribution tactics. Citizens could get cameras for almost nothing from local cops with the implicit suggestion they share their recordings with cops whenever law enforcement asked.

That was the initial wave of bad press: the co-opting of police departments to turn consumer security cameras into extensions of law enforcement surveillance networks. The second wave was almost worse. It involved the hijacking of Ring cameras by malicious jerks who used lists of credentials taken from security breaches to take control of the connected devices.

Ring shifted the blame for these hijackings to the end users. While Ring does encourage the use of "strong" passwords and two-factor authentication, it did not -- until recently -- make either of these the default. A recent update to its "privacy dashboard" finally allowed users to easily control access to their cameras by providing lists of all IP addresses/devices currently logged in. It also nudged users in the direction of 2FA a bit more firmly, making this opt-out, rather than opt-in.

The latest update goes further. And it must have been painful to implement, since it undercuts part of the company's sales pitches to law enforcement agencies. Ring has played up the advantages of cops handing cameras to citizens, creating portals that give officers maps of Ring camera locations and coaching cops on the finer points of obtaining footage without a warrant. This addition to Ring's privacy dashboard is going to make it a bit more difficult for cops to bypass the warrant process when seeking to obtain camera footage from Ring users.

In the new update, users will be able to see an "Active Law Enforcement Map" clarifying which local institutions are part of the Neighbor Portal network. They will also be able to disable requests for video from officials, whether or not they have received one in the past. (This feature was available previously, but an account had to have received one request for the opt-out option to appear.)

Ring's blog post on the dashboard update not-so-subtly hints that users shouldn't do this by telling readers about a couple of times the video request tool was used to solve crimes. Even if this PR nudge proves ineffective, cops aren't completely out of luck. Ring is happy to turn over footage stored in its cloud to law enforcement without notifying users, even as it claims this footage still belongs to the end users.

This is a move in the right direction for Ring. Unfortunately, it still seems focused on becoming an appendage of law enforcement, rather than a producer of consumer goods. As long as it spends more time trying to figure out how it can best assist government middlemen, it's going to keep disappointing the actual users of its cameras.

Filed Under: doorbell, law enforcement, preferences, privacy, ring, ring doorbell, surveillance
Companies: amazon, ring

More Isn't Necessarily Better When It Comes To Preferences

from the keep-it-simple-stupid dept

Facebook has unveiled a new set of privacy settings that have been getting some positive reviews in some quarters. While I'm always happy to see a company that's not afraid to experiment with new privacy protections, I think Facebook has some more work to do on this one.

One problem has been identified by Chris Soghoian: if you're in an academic network, you can theoretically limit access to your profile based on each viewer's academic status at your institution. So if you're an undergrad, you can set things up so that your friends can see those pictures of you doing body shots, but your professors and TAs can't. The problem is that apparently, peoples' status is self-reported, and can easily be changed. So a nosy grad student could temporarily switch his status to "undergrad" and to get access to an undergraduate's photos. This seems like a problem.

The more fundamental flaw, I think, is that there are now way too many options. The exact options I see on my Facebook account are different from the ones Chris sees, presumably because he's a student and I'm not. But on my version of the preferences, there are a dozen categories of information, each of which have 6 to 8 different options. For example, there are separate privacy settings for "profile," "basic info," and "personal info." Do you have any idea what is in each of those categories? I don't. And then you have to decide whether each category will be available to "Only Me," "Some Friends," "All Friends," and "Friends of Friends." And you have to decide which of your "networks" will be able to see that information. And you can provide a list of people to exclude.

This is a bewildering array of options, and it's likely to retard the usefulness of Facebook's privacy features. When it comes to user preferences, a handful of carefully chosen options is better than allowing users to adjust every conceivable setting. A well-designed user-interface should economize on the user's valuable time and attention by giving him a reasonable number of options that encompass the most likely use cases. If you give users a huge number of options, most of them will give up in frustration, leaving them in a much worse position, privacy-wise, than if you'd given them a smaller menu of easy-to-understand options to choose from.

Filed Under: complexity, preferences, simplicity
Companies: facebook