Comment by xp84

1 day ago

I do click yes. It still wastes my time since especially on mobile they obscure at least 1/3 of the viewport. They're just like the other popups that are now on most every site: The "Sign up for our newsletter" or "Get 10% off by signing up for emails", the paywall, the "It looks like you're using an adblocker."

There's a reason people have always hated popup ads even though "just close them" has always been an option.

You should understand that the law doesn't mandate the cookie popup to be annoying. It's a deliberate choice of websites, they want you to hate the banner and the law.

  • I've implemented them. The sites hate them as well. They do it because there are whole law firms now who just troll for clients with ads that say "Did you shop at <BRAND>? Your privacy may have been violated!" and file suits under CCPA, etc. The "violation" was some technicality of a cookie banner. Then the site operator has to pay attorneys and pay a settlement, which pays the plaintiff attorneys. At the end of the day, the "plaintiffs" were never "harmed" at all -- some boring usage data of an ecommerce website or something was put into a Google Analytics dashboard so that some marketer could maybe analyze conversion rates.

    I have seen a ton of these ads in the past few years.

    All these laws have done is created a ton of wealth for lawyers.

  • Well, it works, so it doesn’t matter that it’s the website owners doing it, since in practice the frustration lands on the EU lawmakers. That just makes the law bad: it doesn’t really prevent anything, and it leaves people a little more anti-EU.