Comment by enedil

2 days ago

> most annoying the cookie law

Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?

And either 80% of banners are not respecting the law, or the law managed to omit mandating making it as easy to reject as accept... Rejecting usually require you to enter into settings and sometimes click "reject" for every individual partner(!)

  • That was the case in the beginning, for a while. Now I rarely see even ones where I have to click Settings and Reject all, usually it's just Accept all and Accept only essential. No dark patterns just two equally visible buttons. Often also just "We use only essential cookies" and OK button because they don't have 1138 partners they want to sell your data to

    • I also see more of these, but I'd say still around half require more click for "reject non-essential"

    • And in the latter case, they could even not put any banner at all and still be compliant. The GDPR requires consent only for tracking.

  • The largest Dutch tech website doesn’t adhere to the cookie law. They ever reported about websites not adhering to the law while not adhering to the law themselves.

"Cookie banners are malicious compliance" is starting to wear thin as an excuse. GDPR went into law in 2018, almost ten years ago and for almost as long websites have been "maliciously complying". If you don't don anything about it at some point it's not malicious anymore, it's just how the law is meant to be interpreted.

I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.