Comment by aenis
1 day ago
Those are the same insane morons who came up with the cookie consent. Cottage industry of lawyers that push for those regulations and then collect lucrative retainers from companies wishing to not be fined. One of the reasons EU is so hopelessly behind on any innovation.
Cookie consent popups are only a scourge because publishers would rather further irritate their users than stop selling your data to their 936 “trusted partners”.
This is a bit more nuanced than that.
Under the GDPR provisions, strictly necessary cookies are exempt from the consent screen. But the way the exemptions read prompts all the lawyers to "well, maybe it's sort of necessary for you to have a session_id, but its so, so much safer to have the damn consent screen, so please...".
I worked in technical roles at large companies that had completely honest-to-god private, strictly necessary cookies - where compliance people forced the cookie consent screens, there was no space for a discusion. At my latest company, despite being a CTO, I could not convince our legal team that going without the consent screen as we are really only using "strictly necessary" cookies was fine. Its "mate, you may even be right, but really, nobody is skipping the consent screen, and we won't risk a compliance issue on your say-so.".
Sure, lots of companies - maybe even most - do shit things, and of course the real tagging of people and fingerprinting happens in sophisticated ways that actually defy GDPR, require no cookies whatsoever and so on - and thats another problem. Those moronic consent screens server exactly no real benefit for a while now.
The law doesn’t mention Cookies even once.
If your company is overcompliant, seems to be a company issue. This is a general trend I observed: way too many companies and even government entities don’t do certain things for "privacy reasons", while they’re just lazy and privacy is an excuse.
It’s not like not having a consent banner for necessary cookies will result in a fine right away. Most fines are for serious stuff.
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