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Comment by kiklion | Hacker News Reader

> That cookie banner is mostly corporations trying to be sneaky and trying to trick people into giving consent, or just flat-out misunderstanding the regulation.

If the cookie banner satisfies the regulations and is the path of least resistance, then companies are going to use it.

If the EU doesn’t want the cookie banner everywhere then the regulations need to not allow it.

It is much, much easier to put a banner up than to audit every application and technology used to ensure nothing tracks the user.

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> If the cookie banner satisfies the regulations

That's joke though. Most of them don't. And upon getting called out and/or fined, corporations right now just edge a bit further towards an actually compliant implementation - rinse and repeat. Currently we're in the state of "what if we made it really sloooow and convoluted to opt out?" - which is also not compliant because that makes not giving consent harder than giving consent.

At some point we're going to be there, but right now we're not.

The cookie banners as they are implemented right now are mostly wishful thinking by adtech: "Hopefully this will be enough?"

It's not. But nobody wants to be the first to stop widely tracking people and going back to good old contextual ads. They're going to wait until the EU turns the heat up to 100 and maybe even then wait for a competitor to blink first.

Max Schrems' (of the SchremsI and SchremsII court decisions) noyb group is now aiming for sites with non-compliant banners[1], having filed a first round of over 400 GDPR complaints. It will take years before the regulators come up with rulings and those decisions have been litigated, like it usually does, but it's good to see that somebody at least started the process as the regulators themselves have been - as usual - dragging their feet.

[1] https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-422-formal-gdpr-complaints-ner...

Regulators are massively understaffed. Except maybe the DPA in Ireland, that office seems to have enough resources to rubber stamp whatever comes their way from outside the EU.

> It is much, much easier to put a banner up than to audit every application and technology used to ensure nothing tracks the user.

It is REQUIRED to audit every application and technology to determine what tracks the user. That isn't negotiable, it's the law: you must know where, when and for what purposes you are handling personal data.

After that audit, you can either show a cookie banner etc, or remove the problem applications/technologies.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-30-gdpr/

You still need to audit every application and technology so that you can create a cookie banner that lets you disable them, if necessary.

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