Cookie banners were the “broken window” that led to the whole car being demolished.
I think popup blockers turned back the tide for a while, but businesses eventually learned how to leverage dialogs for some of the same purposes. And, over time, that's been rolled up into WordPress plugins and other easy to implement solutions for one-off site owners, which makes them even more common.
Banners, modal dialogs and other kinds of "new popups" in general are a bit tougher. Usually there is some element you could remove from the DOM tree or display: none but the trouble is knowing which element!
You can provide whatever the user wants to do. Recommendations? Sure. If you want them. The required data collection is then just.... Required. It is tied to this purpose though and can't be used e.g. for ads.
But it is not OK to collect everything about the user so you can charge more for ads or to sell ("exchange") that information. Which is in 99% of cases the reason for these banners.
Either you have no data and so no information to tune your recommendations or you have data in which case you needed to request for consent
IANAL, but worked through implementations that can work without banner consent.
I don't want to imply that it is easy or anything. It's pretty annoying, especially as the purpose of that data needs to be tightly tracked. But it is totally doable.
The Apple/Google duopoly on smartphones is insane.
- Companies face 30% tax, can't deploy, can't do native (Apple) or get scare walls (Google), can't form a customer relationship, get ads sold against their brands, forced to use Apple/Google tech and adopt their upgrade cycles, no VMs/runtimes/plugins, etc.
- Customers also have it bad: they're faced with planned obsolescence, no upgrades, encrypted parts ecosystem, green text FOMO. Apple/Google are owning all of payments, navigation, date/sex life, work calendars, emails, etc. etc. And they're not collecting data on us throughout all these activities?
Or what about Google practically owning web discoverability by paying everyone off?
Why don't we regulate smartphone vendors? This seems fair:
- Web is first class. Users can download apps off of it without scare walls.
- Apps can have native code, WASM, self-update, pack runtimes, etc.
- Apps can use their own auth rails, payments rails, etc.
- No limit on the types of apps. You can deploy non-Safari browsers and app stores of your own.
- Search engine providers can't buy access to every single pane of glass.
I'd argue that we should also regulate them on the basis of the power of their defaults, but we're in such a bind that I'd be fine with just the above.
Texts don’t get sent. Group messages don’t work. Images can’t be sent. Videos can’t be sent. You can’t send on WiFi.
It sucks.
It's a very new regulation, so we've yet to really see the effects.
Actually, I'm sugarcoating things! The EU was cracking down on Android years before even the cookies. US techies genuinely thought EU antitrust was a shakedown to get money out of Google and have conveniently forgotten things since.
Yes, I know that’s probably a recipe for conflicting disaster, but like a lot of these temporary breakages, after about a week the problems with CNN disappeared. And I don’t think I did anything. But, I am US based too.
Do you mean it agrees to all the tracking or declines it?