My websites don't have cookie banners because I don't collect any PII.
The real problem is that there was some idea planted in peoples heads that we should care about privacy. Even worse, a lot of people in the tech world adopted this, without understanding what privacy even is.
In reality, people dgaf about privacy. Of course, they say they do, because its feels good to virtue signal. But for every day things, everyone buys phones and uses apps that track you everywhere and build models, stores their personal data in the cloud, and pretty much always click accept on all the website banners, because when there is nobody around to virtue signal to about privacy, the reward is not there, but the drawback is degraded experience.
But of course anything ideologic like this can be used to win elections, and hence GDPR, which exists only as a means for politicians to gain political power through pretending to care about some aspect of peoples lives.
For the record, privacy = control of the data that you put out, which means you have to go pretty in depth tech wise to set this up if you want full privacy (for example, rooted Android phone with no google apps, removing or firewalling services that phone home). And its fine to accept some level of degraded privacy for a better user experience, but your standard shouldn't be the standard for everyone.
They ought to pass a law that says you can opt out of all the cookies by pushing one button or you can pick the ones you want one by one because whenever you see that list it's astonishing... Though who knows, that might just reinforce monopoly because if sites had a limited number of 3rd party cookies to stick on they would be Google and Facebook.
Pro Tip: Did you know you can get rid of those stupid embed boxes from X on many sites by denying cookies?
That is already what the law says. Opting out should be as simple as opting in. So if accepting all is one click, rejecting all should be too. Every website which does not do it is non-compliant.
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-aims-end-cookie-banner-terror-and-is...
(Part of it I know is that everybody in the advertising ecosystem has their knives out because they expect that everybody else is going to cheat them. If they have 30 tracking cookies from 30 third parties, they can't all be in on the scam, can they?)
There's no need for a 'GDPR' notification for non-tracking cookies. It's not even about the cookie, it's about the tracking.
What's 'ruined the web' (for many) is concentration of sites into a handful of mega-'properties' that seek to own their visitors and users. To say this is GDPR-induced is to propagate and amplify the lie.
The real blame should go to the browser makers and standards bodies. It's their job to save people from this idiocy or otherwise the politicians just screw things up for everybody. Figure out a way to get browsers to have a sane default on handling cookies at the browser level without having to fill in a stupid form on every single page.
[0] This is TechCrunch for example: https://legal.yahoo.com/us/en/yahoo/privacy/topics/thirdpart...
_Cookie_ banners were devised as a lazy way to comply with the ePrivacy Directive, which is about cookies among other things. Now, the same lazy minds that gave us those obnoxious banners are the same that shove unrelated GDPR stuff into them and in our collective throat.
_They_ "ruined the web experience".
It’s as if companies had been adding lead to your milk for decades, then a law passed saying you could only do that with consent, and now you’re complaining that there are all these consent forms every time you want to drink your leaded milk instead of taking it as an indicator to buy from another brand.
Blaming the GDPR is absurd. Who you should blame are the companies who pry on your data and make it purposefully annoying to reject the data collection. Which, by the way, is not following the law because it stipulates rejecting should be as easy as accepting.
If anything, the GDPR should have been more aggressive and made all extraneous data collection outright illegal with no option to opt-in. As it stands, it’s still a powerful indicator of those you cannot trust, letting you know as soon as you open their website.
I’VE had it with the hugely invasive spying tech pulls on us now.
GDPR mandates that those Airtags must constantly beep, so that people know when they are being stalked.
People now have to deal with bags that constantly beep. It is loud and frustrating.
They think it's GDPR's fault, and insist on going back to the way things were.