Comment by jackson1442
1 day ago
"necessary only" also tends to have a malicious compliance aspect where they don't store a cookie recording your preference and show the banner on every single page until you click accept.
1 day ago
"necessary only" also tends to have a malicious compliance aspect where they don't store a cookie recording your preference and show the banner on every single page until you click accept.
Perhaps I am overly optimistic in thinking this is just incompetence.
Yes, you are. The legislative process around EPD/EPR fully anticipated the malicious compliance and it became a back-and-forth political football long before anything was passed. The legislators were never dumb and the corporations were always greedy+powerful.
I had one of the providers recommending us that we leave the "Decline All" button out of Europe, since it's not widely prosecuted, buy recommended that we add it to California, since chances are slimmer.
Naturally in a camera meeting with a "don't tell anyone we said that" appended right before.
The marketing people in the meeting were very angry that California was "doing it to them".
If they fully anticipated this then surely they could've fully anticipated how annoying and useless cookie banners are?
There is nothing stopping a website from using cookies regardless of the banner. If they are outside EU jurisdiction then there won't be any consequences either.
The legislators were and are dumb. They have wasted an enormous amount of collective time for no benefit. Big corporations continued doing what they were doing and nefarious third parties could still track you.
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Well, maybe it is... but then the PM never prioritizes testing or fixing the problem. They're not intentionally trying to get more people to accept cookies, it's just that there are always more important features to build and fires to fight, and fixing the cookie banner won't move any of the metrics executives are breathing down their necks about, and it won't look good in the perf packet...
But of course, designing the system that pushes people to make this sort of decision was absolutely intentional.
So even when it's incompetence, it's still malicious, just in a way that obscures the explicit decision-making that led to the result.
I don't see that as malicious. Is my consent record "strictly necessary"? No. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure they love that, but if sites saved that preference when only necessary was selected, I’m sure a bunch of people would be screaming that they weren’t following the law.
The entire banner is malicious. They don't need consent for necessary or functional cookies. They only need consent to track you - at no benefit to you ever.
I don't think anything is actually "necessary" if you want to be strict on definitions.
I think it's absolutely fair and unlikely to be illegal to use a cookie to remember cookie preferences. Unless the cookie value was not yes/no, but something like a precise timestamp that could be used for uniquely identifying.
Yes, it is strictly necessary to properly honour the user's choice. Not storing a rejection of consent but storing acceptance violates the GDPR because it creates an asymmetry between the effort required to accept vs the effort required to reject user data processing.
The malicious compliance aspect is that they're not offering a choice between "tracking" and "no tracking", but bundling "no tracking" + "painfully degraded functionality" (like repeating the question on every page) = "strictly necessary cookies only"
There is no legal requirement to ask for consent for first party functional cookies. The cookie banner is only for invasive 3rd party trackers.
which they can be sued for as that's not compliant way to handle it. Just that nobody bothers