I am not an expert in this area nor am I a lawyer, but I don’t think that’s the case; cookie banners are needed even for fairly standard functionality, not just the “we want to share your data with our 450 advertising partners” insanity sites. I remember seeing a long argument on reddit about whether you need a banner to be able to store user preferences (eg preferred language), and I believe the conclusion was yes, the law says you do, because it’s stored in the user’s device.
Or even just simple analytics. If the JavaScript on a website is throwing errors for users of a specific version of Firefox, then of course it would be good for the operator of the site to know that. There’s nothing nefarious about it. (I think there are ways around cookie banners for this sort of thing, since it can be considered “essential”, but you have to roll your own – using any pre-made service is a “third party” and necessitates the banner. So that makes actually doing this in a compliant way much more difficult.)
I think a real life equivalent would be if you walked into a store and there was a guy at the entrance like “By the way, we have cameras!” Like yeah no shit a retail space has cameras; leave me alone.
And of course, the actual consequence of this is that everyone is completely desensitized to cookie banners and doesn’t even read what they say. Many users just snap-click “ok” or “agree” or whatever button is to the right to make the annoying thing disappear. Or use browser extensions to try to make them go away completely. They have become completely useless.
Thinking of the camera analogy again, some places like Target and Walmart have camera systems as advanced as casinos’, using facial recognition and tracking as you go throughout the store. Allegedly they can even use body language to determine which products pique your interest so they can better advertise to you. Ok so yeah, wtf is even that, maybe I do want a nagging guy at the door so I can opt out of that bullshit. But if every store has a nagging entrance man, then that case isn’t distinguishable from the regular mom-and-pop trying to prevent theft! So again, useless.
Honestly, they’ve basically shitted on the intent of the GDPR last year when they started allowing sites to block users who did not choose to allow personalized ads as long as they had a “paid” alternative very few people are actually going to use. It was a perversion of what Google did, which was entirely different since they still allowed people to disable personalized ads and accept generic ads instead.
GDPR is great, but we all hate cookie banners
The cookie banner law isn’t the problem, websites don’t have to have one.
They only need to ask permission to invade your privacy.
Too bad nearly every website wants to.
I am not an expert in this area nor am I a lawyer, but I don’t think that’s the case; cookie banners are needed even for fairly standard functionality, not just the “we want to share your data with our 450 advertising partners” insanity sites. I remember seeing a long argument on reddit about whether you need a banner to be able to store user preferences (eg preferred language), and I believe the conclusion was yes, the law says you do, because it’s stored in the user’s device.
Or even just simple analytics. If the JavaScript on a website is throwing errors for users of a specific version of Firefox, then of course it would be good for the operator of the site to know that. There’s nothing nefarious about it. (I think there are ways around cookie banners for this sort of thing, since it can be considered “essential”, but you have to roll your own – using any pre-made service is a “third party” and necessitates the banner. So that makes actually doing this in a compliant way much more difficult.)
I think a real life equivalent would be if you walked into a store and there was a guy at the entrance like “By the way, we have cameras!” Like yeah no shit a retail space has cameras; leave me alone.
And of course, the actual consequence of this is that everyone is completely desensitized to cookie banners and doesn’t even read what they say. Many users just snap-click “ok” or “agree” or whatever button is to the right to make the annoying thing disappear. Or use browser extensions to try to make them go away completely. They have become completely useless.
Thinking of the camera analogy again, some places like Target and Walmart have camera systems as advanced as casinos’, using facial recognition and tracking as you go throughout the store. Allegedly they can even use body language to determine which products pique your interest so they can better advertise to you. Ok so yeah, wtf is even that, maybe I do want a nagging guy at the door so I can opt out of that bullshit. But if every store has a nagging entrance man, then that case isn’t distinguishable from the regular mom-and-pop trying to prevent theft! So again, useless.
Honestly, they’ve basically shitted on the intent of the GDPR last year when they started allowing sites to block users who did not choose to allow personalized ads as long as they had a “paid” alternative very few people are actually going to use. It was a perversion of what Google did, which was entirely different since they still allowed people to disable personalized ads and accept generic ads instead.
There’s a firefox extension I still don’t care about cookies that deals with these.
Since firefox rolled out total cookie protection the risks to privacy are minimal anyway.
I’m applying for work on a lot of websites and I do use that extension. It works maybe 30% of the time. Less annoying, but still super annoying.