> What is malicious compliance?
I think cookie dialogs are the best example of malicious compliance in tech.
Instead of just a "Reject all non-essential cookies" button, corporations went the extra mile to instead have a "Manage preferences" button which opens some slow menu with like 70 separate checkboxes, all of which are ticked by default and so you have to go through all of them manually, which then makes like 90% of the users just cave in to the dark pattern and just click "Accept all".
No law can predict all of the ways someone will try to weasel around it, regardless of whether it's something like the example above, or a company trying to maintain a walled garden.
> As part of the new investigation, the commission is examining 0.50c charge, or “core technology fee”, Apple demands every time a developer’s app is installed on a phone.
That said, while this sounds a bit like the infamous Unity Runtime Fee, if done correctly, personally I wouldn't have as much of an issue with this as others might, if it's done in a way where it never will cause a developer to go in the red: https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
> Instead of just a "Reject all non-essential cookies" button, corporations went the extra mile to instead have a "Manage preferences" button which opens some slow menu with like 70 separate checkboxes, all of which are ticked by default and so you have to go through all of them manually, which then makes like 90% of the users just cave in to the dark pattern and just click "Accept all".
That is not malicious compliance. That's outright non-compliance. Reject All must be as prominent as Accept All.
Guess all of the companies doing that must have missed the memo, though I guess how dire the situation is was more or less known pretty early on: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.02479
There's limited amount of people who can do the litigation, so it's slow going, and the whole point of the mess is to condition people against GDPR
> Instead of just a "Reject all non-essential cookies" button, corporations went the extra mile to instead have a "Manage preferences" button which opens some slow menu with like 70 separate checkboxes, all of which are ticked by default and so you have to go through all of them manually, which then makes like 90% of the users just cave in to the dark pattern and just click "Accept all".
That's straight up non-compliance. The law literally says that refusal has to be as easy as accepting.