Number of Third-Party Cookies on EU News Sites Dropped by 22% Post-GDPR

You bother because even the Boilerplate is still legally valid and boilerplate does include sharing data with 3rd parties for most courts.

Point being is that you can't just do what you want in the ToS. You have to include some form of boilerplate, ie, no surprising / only standard terms of usage.

The most "clearly stated" is I think the following:

> Art. 7, paragraph 3: "It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent."

Although it sounds like this is about withdrawing previously given consent, not rejecting the request for consent at all.

> Recital 32: "If the data subject’s consent is to be given following a request by electronic means, the request must be clear, concise and not unnecessarily disruptive to the use of the service for which it is provided."

Perhaps it could be argued that having to click through multiple menus to reject the request is not concise and is disruptive to the use of the service?

> Recital 42: "In accordance with Council Directive 93/13/EEC a declaration of consent pre-formulated by the controller should be provided in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language and it should not contain unfair terms."

Again, I'd argue that having to click through multiple menus isn't exactly "easily accessible form".

When I was a kid, I was offended that my family members would go to the bathroom while the TV was showing ads. Totally unfair to the TV network... they should have watched all of the ads!

If someone treats you badly, you reach a point where it kind of doesn’t matter what they say they will do if you don’t believe they’ll change. Ad-supported sites are there now. They went wayyyyy too far, treated site visitors poorly with pop-ups, CPU draining, battery draining, data-plan waste, etc. Now they may regret it but many users have moved on. We’re out of the abusive relationship, and it doesn’t matter what sites say anymore. They can’t guilt us into seeing their ads.

No one should browse the web without an ad/script blocker enabled all the time at this point. Exposing your computer to the web without one is like unprotected sex given how malicious advertising has become between tracking behavior data and hosting actual malware.

> users are also website hostile

What a crock. If someone wants to try making a quick buck by programming their computer to spam machines all over the world with millions of ads, it's absolutely legitimate for people to program their own computers to discard such junk.

If that first person's parasitic activities don't make as much money as they predicted, then the failure lies in their prediction.

> Users want to have their cake and eat it too.

Everyone wants that; yet I don't think it's the users who are actually trying it.

Users who block ads are actually eating the site owner's cake. For example, visitors to my (ad-free) site implicitly rely on me paying the hosting and domain fees, i.e. making my cake available for them to eat. Since the cost is small and the enjoyment I get from running the site is high, I'm happy with this arrangement; and would stop if that were no longer the case.

On the other hand, those plastering their sites with ads to make money are the ones trying to have their cake and eat it: they're trying to make a profit from something that is not profitable. They can't lament any loss of money, since it's their fault for giving it away (either directly via hosting fees, or via the opportunity cost of e.g. creating unprofitable content/services instead of something people are willing to pay for).

Separate your ads from your tracking, and host them such that you can guarantee they won’t peg my cpu or mine bitcoin on my computer and we’ll talk. If your idea of ads is tracking me all over the web and taking malware risks, then expect me to block you now and forever.