Most GDPR consent banner implementations are deliberately engineered to be difficult to use and are full of dark patterns that are illegal according to the law.
I wanted to find out how many visitors would engage with a GDPR banner if it were implemented properly and how many would grant consent to their information being collected and shared.
[…]
If you implement a proper GDPR consent banner, a vast majority of visitors will most probably decline to give you consent. 91% to be exact out of 19,000 visitors in my study.
What’s a proper and legal implementation of a GDPR banner?
It’s a banner that doesn’t take much space
It allows people to browse your site even when ignoring the banner
It’s a banner that allows visitors to say “no” just as easy as they can say “yes”
They say they applaud a recent “needed reckoning” on racial justice, but argue it has fuelled stifling of open debate.
The letter denounces “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism” and “a blinding moral certainty”.
Several signatories have been attacked for comments that caused offence.
“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” says the letter.
US intellectual Noam Chomsky, eminent feminist Gloria Steinem, Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and author Malcolm Gladwell also put their names to the letter, which was published on Tuesday in Harper’s Magazine.
The appearance of Harry Potter author Rowling’s name among signatories comes after she recently found herself under attack online for comments that offended transgender people.
Her fellow British writer, Martin Amis, also signed the letter.
It also says: “We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.
“But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.”
The letter condemns “disproportionate punishments” meted out by institutional leaders conducting “panicked damage control”.
Media captionWatch former US President Obama talk about “woke” culture
It continues: “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.”
It was signed by New York Times op-ed contributors David Brooks and Bari Weiss. The newspaper’s editorial page editor was recently removed amid uproar after publishing an opinion piece by Republican Senator Tom Cotton.
Media captionWhat it’s like to be “cancelled”?
“We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement,” the letter says.
It adds: “We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.”
Media captionPresident Trump: “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders.”
One signatory – Matthew Yglesias, co-founder of liberal news analysis website Vox – was rebuked by a colleague on Tuesday for putting his name to the letter.
Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff, a trans woman, tweeted that she had written a letter to the publication’s editors to say that Yglesias signing the letter “makes me feel less safe at Vox”.
But VanDerWerff said she did not want Yglesias to be fired or apologise because it would only convince him he was being “martyred”.
One signatory recanted within hours of the letter being published.
Jennifer Finney Boylan, a US author and transgender activist, tweeted: “I did not know who else had signed that letter.
“I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming.”
This is part of a weaponisation of offensive feelings where moralistic high horse people feels that saying that they’re offended by something allows them to transgress the bounds of normal behaviour.
A ringing bell vibrates simultaneously at a low-pitched fundamental tone and at many higher-pitched overtones, producing a pleasant musical sound. A recent study, just published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences by scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, shows that the Earth’s entire atmosphere vibrates in an analogous manner, in a striking confirmation of theories developed by physicists over the last two centuries.
In the case of the atmosphere, the “music” comes not as a sound we could hear, but in the form of large-scale waves of atmospheric pressure spanning the globe and traveling around the equator, some moving east-to-west and others west-to-east. Each of these waves is a resonant vibration of the global atmosphere, analogous to one of the resonant pitches of a bell. The basic understanding of these atmospheric resonances began with seminal insights at the beginning of the 19th century by one of history’s greatest scientists, the French physicist and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace. Research by physicists over the subsequent two centuries refined the theory and led to detailed predictions of the wave frequencies that should be present in the atmosphere. However, the actual detection of such waves in the real world has lagged behind the theory.
Now in a new study by Takatoshi Sakazaki, an assistant professor at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Science, and Kevin Hamilton, an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawai?i at Mānoa, the authors present a detailed analysis of observed atmospheric pressure over the globe every hour for 38 years. The results clearly revealed the presence of dozens of the predicted wave modes.
The study focused particularly on waves with periods between 2 hours and 33 hours which travel horizontally through the atmosphere, moving around the globe at great speeds (exceeding 700 miles per hour). This sets up a characteristic “chequerboard” pattern of high and low pressure associated with these waves as they propagate (see figure).
Pressure patterns for 4 of the modes as they propagate around the globe. Credit: Sakazaki and Hamilton (2020)
“For these rapidly moving wave modes, our observed frequencies and global patterns match those theoretically predicted very well,” stated lead author Sakazaki. “It is exciting to see the vision of Laplace and other pioneering physicists so completely validated after two centuries.”
But this discovery does not mean their work is done.
“Our identification of so many modes in real data shows that the atmosphere is indeed ringing like a bell,” commented co-author Hamilton. “This finally resolves a longstanding and classic issue in atmospheric science, but it also opens a new avenue of research to understand both the processes that excite the waves and the processes that act to damp the waves.”
So let the atmospheric music play on!
More information: Takatoshi Sakazaki et al, An Array of Ringing Global Free Modes Discovered in Tropical Surface Pressure Data, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1175/JAS-D-20-0053.1
