1mo ago

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

Yes! The current system of online advertising has been ruled illegal

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.

Belgium @lemmy.world

myrmidex @lemmy.nogods.be

1mo ago

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 /2025/06/10/the-current-system-of-online-advertising-has-been-ruled-illegal/

Technology @programming.dev

Pro @programming.dev

1mo ago

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 /2025/06/10/the-current-system-of-online-advertising-has-been-ruled-illegal/

94 comments

Love the sentiment, curious about implementation.
- Simple:
  make "no" the default answer when asking
  massive fine, in the order of 50% of total revenue, the first time you get caught to be paid before the eventual appeal, which if lost raise the fine by 50%. If not paid in 90 days, the CEO goes to jail until it is paid. From now on for 2 years the company must show that it follow the law.
  mandatory jail time for the CEO the second time you get caught with no option for parole or any other alternative sentence like a fine or whatever.
  Or any other solution where the eventual punishment cannot be considered just business cost.
  I know, almost impossible... :-(
  
  Sounds like a plan from someone that has never been lobbied by the advertising industry. Many billions are at stake here. Not many governments can withstand the kind of lobby power this money can buy.
  Would be great to see more crackdown on this though. Random companies are collecting tons of data on people via default opt-in methods.
  
  Please. Need this. Thanks
  Would this work in any court of law?
  I’ve learned recently while the CEO has a lot of control, they are not ultimately in control. The executive board is. Everyone on the board should be jailed and barred from starting a business for 25 years or the length of the sentence, whichever is greater
  
  'No' is already the default, that's why you get the banners, to trick you into opting in. There are a couple of filters that you can enable in uBlock Origin to get rid of (most of) the banners.
  
  I agree with the sentiment, but that harsh of an enforcement method is overkill, the penalty should be a fine, not jail time, because otherwise it could be abused to an insane extent, and 50% will immediately bankrupt pretty much any company immediately, most well structured businesses could probably sustain fines on the order of 40%, I do like your inclusion of percentage based penalties, but realistically with 2-5% fines, any ceo will be removed from their company after the first or second offense, and the company will bankrupt if they sustain more than a couple fines in a year.
  Edit: after doing the math on some actual companies, I believe 2-5% is too low, realistically 5% is the lowest that would actually change business dealings, and 25% will make a company just barely dip into the red. For this reason I think 5-15% should be the goal post.
This is a win for everyone in Europe, and possibly beyond. [Emphasis mine.] Companies may no longer secretly track your behavior based on “consent” given under pressure. Hopefully, this will not only put an end to these dubious practices, but also to those pesky cookie banners.
But we’re not there yet. Regulators have ruled the system illegal, and the court’s ruling has now confirmed it. Still, the companies making billions from this model won’t stop on their own. That’s why European regulators must now truly step up: enforce the law and make sure these companies actually comply.
Regulators try not to get compromised by lobbyists when billions of dollars are at stake.
I sincerely wish you good luck.
- Big corpos aren't going to comply and pay a small fine instead. https://proton.me/tech-fines-tracker
  
  We need the corporate death penalty.
  Or at least take 100% of their revenue (not profit) until they comply.
- I'm sorry but my dream has always been becoming a corrupt politician
Cookies are old news. What about browser fingerprinting which can track you across websites? https://www.amiunique.org/
There's basically no easy way to safeguard against it without making browsing nearly unusable.
- Yes! You are unique among the 3874720 fingerprints in our entire dataset.
  If the website says that I’m unique in green font, it’s actually bad and should be red, isn’t it ?
  
  Yes.
  
  Happened to me, too. Fuck!
- But why unusable, why does a browser have to leak language, window size, time, extensions? Can't those be spoofed?
  
  A lot of those things are also required to render a webpage correctly.
- GDPR is regarding personal data, which includes cookies as well as any other fingerprinting. Even though browser fingerprinting does not persist any data on a device itself, explicit consent must be gathered before it's used for processing (i.e. tracking) purposes.
- You will have your tor-connected 1024x768 anonymous window and you will like it!
  
  tor-connected
  You are unique!
- Tor Browser in normal mode is quite usable though, you just can't use extensions and you need to start a new session whenever you use other websites so they can't track you via cookies. Mullvad Browser is quite similar too.
- oh fuck i'm unique on every browser 😨
Yeah I’ll need the detailed judgment of this one before considering it a massive win. Consent has always been something that needs to be done willingly and freely. The issue is forcing the whole industry to give a shit about the principle. Maybe IAB will have to shift its practices but I haven’t had any panicked calls yet so I assume this isn’t systemic.
This needs to be worldwide.
And... PURGE ALL USER INFORMATION!
I don't care for those 'but what about those people planning/planned crimes?' The one thing I learned from the current Trump administration is that the information is so fucking ripe for abuse AND they don't even catch enough actual crooks that letting a few legit bad people slip through isn't going to bother me.
Random side note: how is Belgium to live in and what would it look like to live there right now? Asking for a friend.
Edit: thanks for al the information. I'll move onto learning more about the country and it's people's history.
- We have better access to healthcare than France, generally good work-life balance, access to education is cheap (1000 eur for one year at a good university ). People are welcoming but also reserved. It’s raining a lot and we spend a lot of time complaining about it.
  
  I have friends who live there, and they report the same. They visited us for the first time here in London recently, and were quite shocked by the stark differences.
  
  It’s raining a lot and we spend a lot of time complaining about it.
  Hey, that's our brand!
  Sincerely, a dude from Hamburg
- how is Belgium to live in and what would it look like to live there right now?
  It's literally between France, Germany and the Netherlands, I mean geographically yes but roughly culturally too. Arguably Brussels is a mix of all that and other cities again match where they are.
  So... it's a Western European country with good quality of life ~~despite~~ thanks to having one of the very highest taxes rate. You don't have to be a socialist to be here but if you want to become a rich entrepreneur it's going to be challenging.
  Source : immigrated there from France ~10 years ago.
  Edit: s/despite/thanks to/
  
  it's a Western European country with good quality of life despite having one of the very highest taxes rate.
  "Despite"? Try, "because"
- I think you can reap the benefits from just using a VPN and set the country to Belgium?
  
  Depends on how many sites comply, most will likely block Belgian IP’s due to this.
  
  Huh, according to the logs, the population of Belgium increased by ~10x, and most people seem to be moving to this area with loss lots of data centers. Checks out.
- Expensive and gray.
  Going down with the rest of Europe economically
wow i didn't know belgium was based. I guess i was wrong when i thought they peaked with french fries
- Idk, their waffles and chocolates are pretty good too.
  
  And beer
- Also first in Europe to ban lootboxes as gambling, iirc.
- still pretty tough to beat the fries. I'd say this is a close second.
- It's a fairytale town, isn't it? How's a fairytale town not somebody's fucking thing?How can all those canals and bridges and cobbled streets and those churches, all that beautiful fucking fairytale stuff, how can that not be somebody's fucking thing, eh?
  Wait, wait. Better quote.
  What's Belgium famous for? Chocolates and child abuse, and they only invented the chocolates to get to the kids.
but but but how are the corporations supposed to make money off of our data if they can't harvest it? Think of the poor corporations!!
Even if idiots with enough money stay unleashed this is great news. One step at a time. Thanks for sharing!
And then the EU introduces the worst spying law in history.
Phew!
Based
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.
Thanks to dumbass EU laws fussing over nonproblems like (check notes) targeted advertising. Really? I voluntarily give out information to an ad-supported service I don't pay for, they turn around & use this to try to show me more relevant ads, and I'm supposed to pretend the internet was ever private & shit my pants over this? While I can understand safeguards from identity theft, cookies aren't that, I don't understand how this concern ever blew up.
Before those laws, those cookie banners didn't exist & I was happy not clicking them. I was under no illusion that online privacy exists with free services running on ad revenue that can track online activity and try to harvest voluntary information that's mostly worthless to me. Free shit in exchange for mostly worthless information & ads I ignore seems like an obvious bargain, but some hypochondriacs had to stir everyone into a frenzy to bitch & moan about it. Do they think the world just runs on magic?
Someone from a developing nation told me that hating advertising is absolutely a luxury of only wealthy nations. Without ad supported formats LATAM, EMEA, and APAC would have far less access to entertainment and information. It made me reexamine how much of my thoughts on this are privileged.
- It's not about advertising. It's about spying on our online lives. Not the same thing.
  
  Yeah but that's not what I was talking about. I too do all the necessary fiddling to try and reduce the amount of fingerprinting an advertiser can do to me. That said, I'm a social butterfly so I have every kind of major social media and chat app because I have to.
- As if there's no other way.
  This sounds like a far-fetched excuse, advertising is ugly, obnoxious and poisonous.
  It has zero qualities.
  
  At the moment there's no other way that makes sense for the companies looking at these regions. The reality is that the infrastructure to deliver digital goods is that it costs the same no matter where you're delivering those goods to. So if people in that region have such a weak currency, they're paying you one 100 th of what say France is paying for something then offering the service to them maybe an unprofitable venture overall. That said, I'm not a businessman because I fucking hate this kind of shit, but the guy's comment really made me stop and observe my own bias.
- You already get the benefit of lower prices for digital products that have the same production cost regarless of where it is sold. I understand that your wages are lower, but I can not like paying a lot more for the same services/
  
  Generally, you wouldn't see things like Netflix and HBO enter Latin America without ad supported versions.
I'm not a fan of being tracked so don't get me wrong, but without the money earned with advertising the Internet will look very different and not only in a good way.
- I disagree. The online advertising industry needs to shrink, and we should probably break up the monopolies.
  Look at this chart:
  Growth of advertising correlates with enshittification.
  
  I 100% agree and totally get why I am being downvoted, but just disabling advertising or banning tracking cookies are not a magic fix to save the internet from the perspective of the companies that now show these ads. But I am definitely I favour of changes, the enshittication went way to far already. But there is more than big social media platforms is what I mean to say.
- Ding ding ding
  Advertising has funded many things yet hasn't made anything better, ever.
  
  A lot of advertising is annoying and misleading, even good advertising can lead to people buying stuff they don't need. I am definitely not pro-advertising but it does serve more than monopolistic capitalism, especially on a more local level.
- Advertising predates tracking by millennia. We can have online advertising without tracking, and certainly without this orgy of sharing data between 4353 partners. But market alone won't get us there, because whoever offers advertising without tracking and selling data will be at a huge disadvantage compared to the crooks who sell. Only regulatory action can help. So this small step should be celebrated.

94 comments