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cafed00d

> Companies could easily avoid any cookie banner. Just don’t track.

Well, then, the EU should've just made _this_ the law.

And we'd have called it the "Just don't track" law.

Rant & Details:

> There is no law for cookie banners.

> What the EU is saying, you need my consent when you want to track me, profile me and sell my behavior off to ad companies.

> or “Look, Why take a chance?” (Remo Gaggi),

This kinda proves PG's point.

Rant: I find it incredible that folks defend the EU by saying things like "There is no law for cookie banners". No, there is a law. The law is reason people think "Look, Why take a chance?" and build crap like cookie banners in. The law is not a bunch of words on paper. It's the institution that incentivizes or punishes people for their actions; thereby influencing people's behavior.

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If you understand the law properly you understand you don't need a cookie banner if you don't track your users. But it is easier to not have to understand it and play safe. But then you shouldn't blame the law for making you do no research and play safe.

Most people are copy cats, and if some big websites add cookie banners, they think they also need to do it because these big sites are doing it. And then they blame the law.

If you're not a copy cat and understand your businesses, there is no need to blame the law for making you do something you don't need to.

And yeah, laws can be complicated to understand sometimes. That's with most laws. But that is why we have lawyers. But yeah lawyers are also often copy cats, it seems. At least in tech. So it's always good to keep thinking for yourself too. Don't believe everything other people are telling you. Do some investigation and research yourself. It's also not that hard.

> The law is reason people think "Look, Why take a chance?" and build crap like cookie banners in.

Really, no. Not being willing to let go of user tracking, and now realizing that it's against the law if you get it wrong, is why people think "Look, why take a chance?" and grasp for shitty dark patterns to cover their asses.

My business did not track its customers online and had no banner. Period.

The law punishes companies, not private citizens. If lawyers are overreacting or companies cannot discern between essential tracking and non-essential then perhaps they are the incompetent ones.

> If lawyers are overreacting or companies cannot discern between essential tracking and non-essential then perhaps they are the incompetent ones.

If the EU is incapable of creating a law where it is unclear even to quite some lawyers where the boundary between allowed and forbidden is, the EU politicians are the incompetent ones.

There are a bazillion unclear laws all over the world. It's common practice, really, to formulate things a little bit generally, and let practitioners (lawyers and courts) figure out the details.

In this case, the unclear point is around the notion of "legitimate interest". I guess something like fraud prevention can be thought of legitimate interest. But ad companies just said, "well, we make money out of tracking the hell out of users, so it's in our legitimate interest to keep doing it, and never mind that the whole point of the law was explicitly to rein in our industry's nasty behaviour."

So now law practitioners how to hash out amongst themselves what "legitimate interest" actually means in 2024, and this of course can change in 2034, so you write the law to not have to be updated every time the tech industry invents new ways of being naughty.

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