What is the most annoying thing about the internet in 2019? I’ll tell you what it is in a few minutes. We’ll also review the phrasal verb “show up” and our quote of the week includes the phrasal verb, that’s a first for us.
I’m Jeff, by the way, and my buddy JR is the producer, and guess what? We made it! This is the last episode of 2019. I was looking back at the most popular episodes of the whole year, just to get a sense of what people liked the most, and do you want to know what one of them was? The episode about New Year’s Resolutions. The episode was called, “Why many New Year’s resolutions fail—and how to make yours stick” and it was episode number 117 at PlainEnglish.com/117.
What are your New Year’s resolutions this year? Eat better, save more money, get a better job? Those are some typical ones. How about improving at your English? What if 2020 could be the year in which you take that next step to learning how to express yourself confidently in English? If that sounds good, but you don’t exactly know how to practice, then I would encourage you to check out our new membership program, Plain English Plus+. With a membership to Plain English Plus+, you’ll build your vocabulary, gain confidence, and learn to express yourself better. JR and I have so many plans for Plain English Plus+ in 2020. If you join today, you’ll be among the first to see all the new features we’ll be rolling out in the first few months of the new year.
If this is going to be the year for you, if this is going to be the year you leave the awkward moments behind, if this is the year you decide you want to speak confidently like a professional, then this needs to be the year you join Plain English Plus+. You can make that happen by visiting PlainEnglish.com/Plus today.
Cookie announcements: the most annoying thing on the internet
Quick: what’s the most annoying thing on the internet these days? Time was, you might have said popups. Remember popups? You’d land on a web site and one or more new smaller browser windows would pop up in your face. Most websites don’t use them anymore; advertising has become a lot more integrated into the fabric of sites. Besides, popup blockers made those ads less effective.
I’m talking about today, December 30, 2019. The most annoying thing on the internet. I’ll tell you what I think it is: cookie policy announcements. They show up as a banner along the top or the bottom of the page. They can be short, like this one: “This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.” Or they can be long, making you read a long paragraph and check different boxes to offer varying levels of consent. One thing they all are: annoying, and, new studies are finding, broadly useless.
Let’s back up. Cookies are text files that keep track of information about yourself, such as your login information or your activity on a website. If you visit a site and your username is pre-populated, that’s a cookie at work. Businesses use cookies to customize a user’s experience on their sites. These are called first-party cookies.
A third-party cookie is a cookie from a different website—not the one you’re on. For example, you might find that your internet search data follows you around the internet. If you’re looking for a nice leather chair on one web site, you might see ads for leather chairs in your Facebook feed, in your Amazon suggestions, and in ads on other sites. That’s all because of third-party cookies.
Businesses love them. Some consumers hate them, but most consumers are indifferent. I’m in the latter camp. I just like the internet to work for me. I’ve come to terms with the fact that personal data is out there somewhere, although I’d prefer that the data not be abused too badly. As data abuses go, cookies are not too bad. Mishandling or losing personal information like credit cards and government ID numbers and bank account numbers is far worse than installing cookies on your browser, in my opinion.
The European Union implemented a policy called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. This applies to all online businesses with customers in the EU. That would be me; that would be most online information-based businesses. It applies to us all. It says a lot of things, but one thing it says is, users should have the right to know how their personal data is being used and they should have the opportunity to agree with it, or opt out.
That’s why we have the cookie announcements. According to GDPR, companies that serve EU citizens must tell those people what personal information they’re collecting and how that data will be used. A browser cookie is personal information. So if a website wants to collect data from web browsers in the EU, then GDPR says they must tell the users what’s going on. Web sites that want to comply with GDPR, in other words, put a popup on their site with their cookie policy and ask you to agree to it.
That sounds good in theory: sites are disclosing what they’re doing with information and users have the chance to either agree, or navigate away. But the user experience is terrible. Internet users—certainly myself included—we just blithely click “accept” because that banner is the one thing standing in the way of the information we want to get. The vast, vast majority of internet users don’t read agreements like cookie policies or privacy policies, but we click “accept” several times a day.
As annoying as these announcements are, it’s not even clear that they’re compliant with the regulation. The GDPR didn’t explicitly say these announcements had to be made. Site owners are doing it more out of fear than anything else: they’d rather be safe than sorry because the regulation carries hefty penalties for violating the policy.
There must be a better way. One idea is for an independent body to have ratings systems, kind of like LEED compliance for energy-efficiency. Web sites that have strong, consumer-friendly policies could earn easy-to-understand badges. Sites without the badges might warrant more scrutiny from visitors. Unfortunately, there’s no standards-setting body for internet privacy, so most sites will probably continue to bombard us with these useless notifications for the foreseeable future.
We have not put a cookie announcement on our web site. And that’s for a few reasons. First, we’re still pretty small, so we’re not the target of EU regulators looking to bust a site for data privacy violations. Second, I have really hesitated to cheapen the user experience with a useless notice. I’m an internet user myself and I hate the banners and I don’t want to subject my site visitors to that, especially since the law isn’t clear that they’re even necessary.
But I might. One thing is for sure, the world is not going to get fewer data privacy regulations in the future. We’re going to get more. So I may as well get in the habit of complying with them, regardless of how big or small my site becomes.
I want to say hi to a few listeners today. First, Felipe in New Zealand. He has a very personal reason for learning English and he sent me a heartfelt note describing his English journey. I won’t share the details out loud, but, Felipe, I want you to know that I’m proud to have you in the audience and congratulations for all the improvement you’ve made in English so far.
The first listener to ever send me a note from Somalia is Abdullahi. He lives in the capital of Mogadishu with his family of five and is a humanitarian worker. Finally, Jeder [Jadder] from Brazil is an engineer in Belo Horizonte and listens on Spotify in the car on the way to work.
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