GDPR, Boards.ie and Vanilla, how does this work?

Cloudflare has been in use for a few years now.

There appears to be a new Cookie Consent. It's very interesting. They still have the AGREE button highly visible and the DISAGREE [a bis step forward but with dark design tendencies] button with white background. You can now get back into this window by clicking the settings cog at the bottom right of the window. Another big step forward.

Clicking on MORE OPTIONS shows that all options are turned off by default. This is in keeping with GDPR so good for them.

Some of their "Special Purposes" sound interesting. "Match and combine offline data sources" with a legal description of "Vendors can: Combine data obtained offline with data collected online in support of one or more Purposes or Special Purposes." To me that sounds like a marketing / personalised ads thing. It's very opaque wording that actually doesn't mean anything but also means everything.

The Jewel in the Crown appears to be the "Legitimate Interests" link. It appears that you have to specifically come in here and object to everything. The main DISAGREE button doesn't appear to turn these things off. For example, personalised ads. How can they personalise an ad if I disagreed to cookies from the DISAGREE button.

Have a look at their "Legitimate Interest" vendors list. It's a who;s who of marketing and ads providers. You can read through the list yourself but the very first legitimate interest is 1plusX AG [https://www.1plusx.com/] and in their own words "Our platform is much more than a DMP. It's Marketing Intelligence at your fingertips to help you really understand your users.So you can make business decisions based on certainty. Not gut feeling."

How are hundreds of marketing vendors [ok, I didn't count them but it's a huge list] "Legitimate Interest"? Why are these not rejected when I press DISAGREE?

None of these legitimate interest vendors are listed in the Privacy Policy.

Accepting all, then clicking on the settings cog and rejecting them all, doesn't remove any cookies. The marketing cookies appear to remain.

On a fresh install of Chrome with Allow all cookies enabled, no 3rd party cookies are created when I click Disagree on the dialog box.

For the long list of Legitamate Interests, it looks like they use a platform called Quantcast to manage consent (which is pretty common) and the list is just a generic one probably managed by Quantcast.

Are you really saying that a browser ad blocker will prevent cookies being deleted for a particular site - in this case Boards?

The new Privacy Statement doesn't mention recording and tracking IP address data. Does that mean that admins and mods will no longer have access to this data for tracking rereg users or similar?

The silence is deafening. The staff were very quick to answer almost every other question except GDPR. I'm starting to feel that the only resoilutionprocess is to send a formal written registered letter to their DPO, detailing the questions. Very bad form on Boards part. It's almost like they just want this issue to go away and sweep it under the carpet.

Sweep it under the carpet!.......

Is this what's in the new privacy statement? (I never read them, just click and agree :-O )

Is the carpet in the EU or Canada? And are all the old deleted PM's going there too along with everything else!

Please tell me... I NEED to know.... :-)

Sorry.....:-(

Once the important things like banning the mention of other sites are happening then stuff like GDPR, the handling of members personal data and the release of God knows how many personal email addresses onto the Web is small fry in comparison.

It was hard work to get them over the line, but they do seem to have taken some GDPR feedback on board on this issue.