Alternatively, you can just not track the behaviour of every person who lands on your website.
Use contextual ads instead of personalised ads.
Tracking behaviour is useful to ensure the site is working, that people are able to use the site and make purchases, or even to know what parts of the site people are using. There is nothing wrong with that, so long as the logs are not shared and not kept for longer than necessary.
Tracking people's use of the site to build a profile of them and share with third parties, without consent, is where the privacy problem comes from.
If you do not track users but just track usage that should not require consent. So if you track for example purchases per hour (but not which users made a purchase) you can see if it becomes irregular. You can also track usage of certain site functions without tying that data to a specific user or session.
So the actually necessary tracking does not require consent, but since companies got used to tracking everything and tying it to users/sessions before these laws it seems like they try to continue on that path instead of adapting.
Yeah, nice for you! But you're requiring my collaboration in your investigations; sorry, but I can't tell which cookies (or web-storage blocks) are for checking whether my behaviour is "irregular", and which are intrusive data-collectors.
I'm not going to scrutinise every cookie a site serves; life's too short. I configure my browser to accept first-party session-cookies only. My web-storage pool is zero bytes. If your site doesn't work with those settings, your site is broken (and I'll find a better one).
At no point does that require cookies or personal data or personal tracking. My point was that you don't need cookies or personally identifiable info to be able to make sure a website runs well.
If that's the only way you can tell the site is working, then something's obviously wrong.
> There is nothing wrong with that
Indeed, there's nothing wrong with that, except that I'm not OK with cookies that are served by third-parties, or by some framework or analytics script that you've thrown onto the site.
I'm not talking about 3rd party analytics.
But due to lax enforcement companies just keep ignoring this. Luckily it's (very) slowly changing. Even Google was recently forced to amend their practices but it took a fine of 150 million, and probably a threat of a lot more for them to finally do it. https://www.cnil.fr/en/cookies-google-fined-150-million-euro...
If anyone is interested, NOYB is doing good work to make sure companies are aware that they are breaching the GDPR, which is also very useful when it finally comes to enforcing it as they can't pretend they didn't know. If you like their work you can become a member to support them.
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-aims-end-cookie-banner-terror-and-is...