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A lot of cookie banners intended to satisfy GDPR don't - websites have to have a clear opt out, and anything "go to these other sites and opt out individually" is probably not compliant. Some big vendors however pushed the bounds of this and probably are getting their asses handed to them - but as with all legal things this would be happening in slow motion. GDPR has some good ideas, but implementation hasn't been perfect.

CCPA https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa in my opinion is a more straightforward law. Basically: if you want to sell someone's information you have to get consent first. It still has some of the "banner on every site" problem but at least most which are clearly for CCPA are binary ok/don't sell my data questions.

Yeah. Cookies qua cookies are at best something obvious and measurable, but don't necessarily correlate with the company doing anything nefarious with your information. What's worse, it has always been the client's choice to keep cookies. You can, e.g., browse in a private tab on Chrome and they'll get automatically deleted.

The fact that cookies are A) only loosely correlated with undesired behavior and B) already optional makes it absurd that every site I visit should waste 10 seconds of my time with a banner asking me to consent to their use of cookies. Especially because the only way for them to remember that preference is... to give you a cookie!

Fortunately Brave has an option to automatically skip those banners, which works on most sites.

You and the parent are conflating GDPR with the "ePrivacy Directive" (cookie law).

GDPR doesn't say much about cookies. What GDPR says is that you have to have a legal basis for processing user data. For example, a DPA just ruled that Facebook doesn't have a "legitimate interest" when using the user profile for ads targeting, so they'll be forced to ask for opt-in consent without the ability to deny service to those that refuse. A legitimate interest is for things the customer expects as part of the service, e.g. an address is needed for home delivery, or maybe data needed for security (IP logging).

https://thisisunpacked.substack.com/p/the-eu-war-on-behavior...

The cookie banners are needed when websites are fingerprinting users. The website may have a legitimate interest for doing analytics, but the user still needs to be informed that they are fingerprinted. NOTE: here, too, you don't need cookie banners if it's functionality that the user expects, like a session or a shopping cart cookie.

At the risk of repeating myself: websites need cookie banners or GDPR consent dialogs mostly when doing shit that violates people's privacy.

I've read a lot of complaints against GDPR on HN and elsewhere and I feel that it misses the forest from the trees: those banners and dialogs expose just how widespread the practice of violating people's privacy is. And I fear that a lot of the backlash coming from Silicon Valley has been from people connected to the ads industry.

> NOTE: here, too, you don't need cookie banners if it's functionality that the user expects, like a session or a shopping cart cookie.

As I point out every time this comes up, under ePrivacy the burden the site has to meet is not "expects" but "strictly necessary to satisfy a user request". And the way most sites implement shopping carts, where items will still be in your cart if you close your browser and come back the next day, isn't ok:

a merchant could set the cookie either to persist past the end of the browser session or for a couple of hours in the future to take into account the fact that the user may accidentally close his browser and could have a reasonable expectation to recover the contents of his shopping basket when he returns to the merchant's website in the following minutes. https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio... (2.3)

Maintaining a shopping cart across days isn't "strictly necessary" and so requires explicit consent.

(More: https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-so-many-cookie-banners)

IANAL, but as a layman, I don't think I agree with your article. But thanks for the links.

I don't think the difference between hours and days is relevant, unless the law says that there's a difference. Setting user preferences, such as the language, is a matter of accessibility. I'd be hard-pressed to think of a better sample of “strictly required”.

Setting user preferences, such as a “dark mode” toggle, wouldn't be any different from setting the browser or operating system's dark mode preference, a bit that web pages can always read.

It's important to remember that ePrivacy isn't strictly about cookies, but about all client-side data that gets sent to the server. For example, in case you're doing analytics, fingerprinting via any other means except for cookies (e.g., user agent, HTTP referrer, IP, etc.) still counts under ePrivacy. As such, you can fingerprint users via “window.matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme: dark)')”, and if you do that, then yes, you need a cookie banner. But not for doing what the user agent asked for.

For analytics, indeed, you need a cookie banner. And while it's a concern of service providers to improve their service that I understand, it's not something that the user expects. And my personal problem is that the entire web ended up using Google Analytics. Such data ends up being shared with third parties, which is why it's good that it is opt-in.

I do agree that businesses should consult lawyers (＾＾)ｂ

Remembering user preferences are very different; I didn't bring them up and don't disagree there.

My claim is that many things users might expect to be retained are not automatically ok to retain, and that shopping carts as typically implemented are one of these.

> I think there's a selection effect going on here [...] So, I don't think "boy who cried wolf" is a fair analogy. Tech companies aren't always right, but it's not as if they're automatically opposed to all new policies; and when they do oppose politicians' proposed policies, it's sometimes for good reasons.

I think you are missing another, equally massive, source of information politicians are exposed to: lobbying. We see Microsoft complaining about mergers, but politicians are exposed to non-stop lobbying.

> GDPR cookie banners are a joke

Many of the sites actually don't require cookie notifications because strictly necessary cookies^ are GDPR compliant but they still display the notification. In theory if cookie notifications were omitted when possible then sites who track more than needed would stick out immediately.

^ Strictly necessary cookies are essential for websites to provide basic functions or to access particular features of it. Such features include the ability to sign in, add items to your cart in an online store, or purchase stuff on the internet.

> If tech and politicians agree that some policy is a good idea, then tech does it voluntarily, so no regulation is needed. The only cases where it becomes a matter of regulation are the cases where tech and politicians disagree.

And these cases are the utter majority.

> For example, GDPR cookie banners are a joke.

They are, but only for those services that want to squeeze their customers like they're data lemons. What you need to do to provide the customer with the service they desire is covered automatically, the thing where you need a GDPR consent banner is if you want to include a truckload of external services to track your users across the Internet.

I set up a nice little webpage, that did not use any tracking at all. There was one cookie for a home-brew login functionality, and even that was only linked to an extremely limited amount of data (namely, the login name, and the password, didn't even mandate email...).

By all means, this one cookie - whose use was completely voluntary - was a 'technical cookie' which I do not need consent for under the EU's cookie laws.

It took about 30 minutes after the go-live before the first madmen came around and started shouting at me that I needed a cookie banner.

The problem with that law is not only that it caused everyone to set up a cookie banner to operate as they used to, it also is that it created a class of people who are self-declared data protection vigilantes.

I do consider publishing on Gopher (or Gemini) in the future, if only to prevent zealots - who often have no technical knowledge - from accessing my services. The people I address are capable - and willing - to use other protocols.

> And these cases are the utter majority.

I think it's the opposite -- tech and politicians agree on the vast majority of things, but they're considered banal so the topic never comes up. But, you could imagine an alternate universe where tech did things differently, and then politicians wanted to regulate them. Here are some examples:

* Tech companies offer most of their services for free. You could imagine a world where Google charged for searches and Facebook charged for posting, and so "poor people being excluded from the Internet" became a political issue.

* Tech companies translate their services into a variety of languages. You could imagine a world where Google and Facebook were only available in English, and so "non-English-speakers being excluded from the Internet" became a political issue.

* Tech companies don't allow anyone to view DMs, private posts, etc. except law enforcement. You could imagine a world where Google and Facebook had a culture where it was normal for employees to snoop on other peoples' DMs, and it became a political issue.

* Conversely, you could imagine a world where tech companies refused to allow law enforcement access to peoples' DMs even with a valid warrant, and it became a political issue. (This is starting to happen.)

* Tech companies allow anyone to post by default. You could imagine a world where tech companies only allowed people to post if tech companies liked their political views (similar to how newspapers' biases affect which editorials they publish) and it became a political issue. (This is starting to happen: the left is pressuring tech companies to restrict certain right-wing content, and the right is talking about regulation to force tech not to do that.)

* Tech companies sometimes kick people off the platform for arbitrary procedural reasons, but not for personal pettiness reasons (with the notable exception of Elon Musk kicking people off Twitter). You could imagine a world where it was normal for e.g. Google to delete a journalist's GMail account if the journalist published something Google didn't like, and it becoming a political issue.

* Tech companies often contribute to open-source standards and software. For example, Google is heavily involved in defining web standards; and they made Chromium open-source, allowing rivals like Microsoft to build on it. You could imagine a world where the tech ecosystem was much more fragmented and closed-source than it is today, and it becoming a political issue.

This is what I was saying about a selection effect: You can easily think of ways that politicians want to regulate tech more, because those topics are controversial and make the news. But there are actually a ton of ways that tech _could_ be much worse than it is, but those topics never come up, so it takes some imagination to think of them.