We actually took a walk around that area a few weeks back, along with our Ministry of Detail clipboard. For one of the boxes we had to queue for a good while as there were so many people wanting a photograph with it. The conditions of the boxes varied but very few were in a reasonable state. Clearly right that the number of times people experience a place should factor in to prioritisation of their maintenance. It makes us think of other “civic facades” like airport arrival terminals and train stations - often the first impression you get of a place.

Cookie notices on the Web seem to be by far the most ‘polluting’ aspect of the online experience, moreso than the privacy invasions they are ostensibly intended to reduce. Is there an inverse correlation here? I doubt it, as we had other ways of addressing such invasions. And those who engage in them are unlikely to worry about breaking UK or EU law. The GDPR was like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. After the UK left the EU in 2020, UK government could have removed from Website publishers this requirement imposed by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Instead, it has retained it under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), updated 2011. Cookie notices must be one of the most jarring experiences of using the modern Web (and there are many!), breaking multiple tenets of good user experience (focus on user goals, visual distraction, poor user interface, and more). Moreover, Website publishers seem to ask for cookie assent almost every time one visits their site/service, probably to be doubly sure they are in the clear. They seem not to care about how this debilitates us as we dismiss them on site after site as we ‘surf the Web’. Moreover, we use and rely on the Web/apps more than ever, with over 80% of the UK population owning a smartphone. That this degraded experience is not recognised by politicians may in part reflect their reliance on others to ‘use’ the Web for them. This is symbolic of the squandered potential of leaving the EU. We could have freed ourselves up in so many ways. Yet the instincts of this Conservative government are so aligned with the EU’s technocratic mindset they have chosen not only to retain alignment with the ‘EU Cookie Law’, but in 2023 they introduced the even more controlling and bureaucratic Online Safety Act. Where over the last 20 or more years there is little one can claim government has improved in the lives of everyday people – from jobs to housing, transport to the cost of living, energy prices to civil liberties – one area in which we have bootstrapped our quality of life is by imaginatively developing and using ICT. By creatively using the PC Web to smartphones, tablets to connected devices, most people could say they have improved their personal, work and social lives. Yet, in the age of the productive rollout of ICT making up for government incompetence and inability (or unwillingness?) to deliver for everyday people, it chooses to try to hobble even that. And Labour in government threatens to be worse in both dimensions. Perhaps Website publishers in the UK, particularly those with a liberty-oriented mindset, should simultaneously remove their cookies notice and see what the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) (@ICOnews) can do about it?

Hello, we are Jonathan and Abigail - unashamed pedants who want to bring this affliction to bear on all things public policy and practice. We believe that details matter, especially in public administration. This is why today we are founding quibble: a campaign to fix the small stuff. Think, for example, about the cookie banner that we click on every webpage. Each instance is not a big deal, so we just put up with it. But its cumulative impact adds up - on average we press it 5 times per day. The European Commission estimates that it costs EU citizens 343 million hours per year. And who is there to represent the impacts of seemingly minor issues like this in a systematic way? We want quibble to be the answer. In the case of the cookie banner, lots of advocacy has rightly focused on privacy, but has this meant that user experience has taken a backseat? We believe there are ways to improve user experience without compromising on privacy. We will share more about this soon. Consider another example. Did you know that in some government-run car parks you can be fined for a minor keying error, such as accidentally typing a zero instead of an “o”? Again, we will come to the detail of this quibble in the coming weeks, but for now just consider again the question: who? Who is there currently to systematically represent the interests of the parker who is given an unfair ticket? An inherent feature of consumer interests is that those who have them rarely have enough other things in common to make collective organisation and representation feasible. This is the gap that quibble seeks to fill. Now of course excellent consumer interest groups exist. But understandably quibbles might not be at the top of their lists. Our hope is that quibble will be complementary; picking up the bottom-of-the-list issues faced by various groups - the stuff they are almost too embarrassed to raise because they are too small. We are not embarrassed about detail. If you’ve ever had a splinter, you know small things can have a big impact. This is what quibble is committed to tackling, and our wider hope is that by doing so we will also incentivise policy makers to be even more careful about detail. Check out our website here, including our first four campaigns: quibble.org.uk

Hello, we are Jonathan and Abigail - unashamed pedants who want to bring this affliction to bear on all things public policy and practice. We believe that details matter, especially in public administration. This is why today we are founding quibble: a campaign to fix the small stuff. Think, for example, about the cookie banner that we click on every webpage. Each instance is not a big deal, so we just put up with it. But its cumulative impact adds up - on average we press it 5 times per day. The European Commission estimates that it costs EU citizens 343 million hours per year. And who is there to represent the impacts of seemingly minor issues like this in a systematic way? We want quibble to be the answer. In the case of the cookie banner, lots of advocacy has rightly focused on privacy, but has this meant that user experience has taken a backseat? We believe there are ways to improve user experience without compromising on privacy. We will share more about this soon. Consider another example. Did you know that in some government-run car parks you can be fined for a minor keying error, such as accidentally typing a zero instead of an “o”? Again, we will come to the detail of this quibble in the coming weeks, but for now just consider again the question: who? Who is there currently to systematically represent the interests of the parker who is given an unfair ticket? An inherent feature of consumer interests is that those who have them rarely have enough other things in common to make collective organisation and representation feasible. This is the gap that quibble seeks to fill. Now of course excellent consumer interest groups exist. But understandably quibbles might not be at the top of their lists. Our hope is that quibble will be complementary; picking up the bottom-of-the-list issues faced by various groups - the stuff they are almost too embarrassed to raise because they are too small. We are not embarrassed about detail. If you’ve ever had a splinter, you know small things can have a big impact. This is what quibble is committed to tackling, and our wider hope is that by doing so we will also incentivise policy makers to be even more careful about detail. Check out our website here, including our first four campaigns: quibble.org.uk

Hello, we are Jonathan and Abigail - unashamed pedants who want to bring this affliction to bear on all things public policy and practice. We believe that details matter, especially in public administration. This is why today we are founding quibble: a campaign to fix the small stuff. Think, for example, about the cookie banner that we click on every webpage. Each instance is not a big deal, so we just put up with it. But its cumulative impact adds up - on average we press it 5 times per day. The European Commission estimates that it costs EU citizens 343 million hours per year. And who is there to represent the impacts of seemingly minor issues like this in a systematic way? We want quibble to be the answer. In the case of the cookie banner, lots of advocacy has rightly focused on privacy, but has this meant that user experience has taken a backseat? We believe there are ways to improve user experience without compromising on privacy. We will share more about this soon. Consider another example. Did you know that in some government-run car parks you can be fined for a minor keying error, such as accidentally typing a zero instead of an “o”? Again, we will come to the detail of this quibble in the coming weeks, but for now just consider again the question: who? Who is there currently to systematically represent the interests of the parker who is given an unfair ticket? An inherent feature of consumer interests is that those who have them rarely have enough other things in common to make collective organisation and representation feasible. This is the gap that quibble seeks to fill. Now of course excellent consumer interest groups exist. But understandably quibbles might not be at the top of their lists. Our hope is that quibble will be complementary; picking up the bottom-of-the-list issues faced by various groups - the stuff they are almost too embarrassed to raise because they are too small. We are not embarrassed about detail. If you’ve ever had a splinter, you know small things can have a big impact. This is what quibble is committed to tackling, and our wider hope is that by doing so we will also incentivise policy makers to be even more careful about detail. Check out our website here, including our first four campaigns: quibble.org.uk

Hello, we are Jonathan and Abigail - unashamed pedants who want to bring this affliction to bear on all things public policy and practice. We believe that details matter, especially in public administration. This is why today we are founding quibble: a campaign to fix the small stuff. Think, for example, about the cookie banner that we click on every webpage. Each instance is not a big deal, so we just put up with it. But its cumulative impact adds up - on average we press it 5 times per day. The European Commission estimates that it costs EU citizens 343 million hours per year. And who is there to represent the impacts of seemingly minor issues like this in a systematic way? We want quibble to be the answer. In the case of the cookie banner, lots of advocacy has rightly focused on privacy, but has this meant that user experience has taken a backseat? We believe there are ways to improve user experience without compromising on privacy. We will share more about this soon. Consider another example. Did you know that in some government-run car parks you can be fined for a minor keying error, such as accidentally typing a zero instead of an “o”? Again, we will come to the detail of this quibble in the coming weeks, but for now just consider again the question: who? Who is there currently to systematically represent the interests of the parker who is given an unfair ticket? An inherent feature of consumer interests is that those who have them rarely have enough other things in common to make collective organisation and representation feasible. This is the gap that quibble seeks to fill. Now of course excellent consumer interest groups exist. But understandably quibbles might not be at the top of their lists. Our hope is that quibble will be complementary; picking up the bottom-of-the-list issues faced by various groups - the stuff they are almost too embarrassed to raise because they are too small. We are not embarrassed about detail. If you’ve ever had a splinter, you know small things can have a big impact. This is what quibble is committed to tackling, and our wider hope is that by doing so we will also incentivise policy makers to be even more careful about detail. Check out our website here, including our first four campaigns: quibble.org.uk

Hello, we are Jonathan and Abigail - unashamed pedants who want to bring this affliction to bear on all things public policy and practice. We believe that details matter, especially in public administration. This is why today we are founding quibble: a campaign to fix the small stuff. Think, for example, about the cookie banner that we click on every webpage. Each instance is not a big deal, so we just put up with it. But its cumulative impact adds up - on average we press it 5 times per day. The European Commission estimates that it costs EU citizens 343 million hours per year. And who is there to represent the impacts of seemingly minor issues like this in a systematic way? We want quibble to be the answer. In the case of the cookie banner, lots of advocacy has rightly focused on privacy, but has this meant that user experience has taken a backseat? We believe there are ways to improve user experience without compromising on privacy. We will share more about this soon. Consider another example. Did you know that in some government-run car parks you can be fined for a minor keying error, such as accidentally typing a zero instead of an “o”? Again, we will come to the detail of this quibble in the coming weeks, but for now just consider again the question: who? Who is there currently to systematically represent the interests of the parker who is given an unfair ticket? An inherent feature of consumer interests is that those who have them rarely have enough other things in common to make collective organisation and representation feasible. This is the gap that quibble seeks to fill. Now of course excellent consumer interest groups exist. But understandably quibbles might not be at the top of their lists. Our hope is that quibble will be complementary; picking up the bottom-of-the-list issues faced by various groups - the stuff they are almost too embarrassed to raise because they are too small. We are not embarrassed about detail. If you’ve ever had a splinter, you know small things can have a big impact. This is what quibble is committed to tackling, and our wider hope is that by doing so we will also incentivise policy makers to be even more careful about detail. Check out our website here, including our first four campaigns: quibble.org.uk