Is it safe to assume you've never had to deal with those downright malevolent dark patterns and button labyrinths, designed to make it extremely unlikely for anyone in the general population to actually reject tracking?
Yes.
Absolutely.
dont blame the lawmaker for participants bad behaviour?
well, ok. allright.
but i DO blame the responsible authorities for licking the misbehaving participants' boots
Ok, but they are enforced. So this entire line of reasoning makes absolutely zero sense. If your demand is that every infraction is enforced immediately, then you will be disappointed. Such things take time.
> i DO blame the responsible authorities for licking the misbehaving participants' boots
There's a single European country that does this (Ireland) and it is definitely a stain on an otherwise healthy situation in terms of enforcement. It is not fair to attribute their willful ignorance in the face of plain bribing to the rest of the enforcement agencies.
Fortunately organizations like NOYB (with Max Schrems) are doing exactly this: https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-422-formal-gdpr-complaints-ner... Once there are a few high-profile cases with high fines to set a precedent, this hopefully changes the way companies handle cookie banners.
How many sites have you reported?
[0]: https://edri.org/our-work/the-eu-parliament-takes-strong-sta...
[Recital 32]: https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-32/
A solution to a poliical problem is political, not technical.
And a fundamentally bad one: providers' incentive is to make it easy to get consent and hard to refuse.
I don't know what policy is better than this, but right now, we only get more annoyance without any benefits in privacy. Pretty much every page I've visited issues 3rd party requests before I consent to data sharing.
Most of these banners violate the GDPR even before they're showing up, because the GDPR actually restricts your ability to embed non-first-party content without consent. That's why Google Fonts violates the GDPR, for example. Arguably every vanilla Wordpress install violates the GDPR because Wordpress embeds something from s.w.org on every page (presumably for install count / analytics reasons).
This kinda sounds like a bad thing but it's not. It's actually a huge boon, because it's an excellent legal excuse to get rid of embedding stuff from 213789 origins and CDNs, which only has negative performance effects since caches have been origin-segregated for years, meaning that even if another page uses the same jQuery version from cdnjs, it will be downloaded again anyway.
Hard disagree. I've been racking my brain as of late trying to decide if default apache access logs violate the GDPR, and stackexchange searches on the topic seem to confirm the confusion.
If the legality of data collection hinges on what is considered necessary for service maintenance in the eye of a judge, the law is not clear.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ensigns_of_Command
The other aspect of EU law that always gets US companies is that penalties are large enough to actually be penalizing. In the US companies can basically ignore the law until they get caught, pay a token $100,000 or $1,000,000 fine (which sounds impressive in all the papers), then invent a new interpretation of the law and go do it again. In the EU the regulators start looking at percentages of income during the entire time the illegal activity occurred, so again the US companies are caught completely off guard when they get asked to forfeit billions of dollars.
This can change, but enforcement and courts by nature are slow. With EU courts striking down asymptotic consent banners as illegal, sites are spooked, and you now see sites adding a "reject all" button next to the "accept all". I still have hope we get there.