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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

It's one of the best marketing moves corporate has done in a long while that people think the banners are due to GDPR or the EU cookie law — they're not. They're only there because companies want to track you in as many ways as possible and they legally cannot without showing you a banner. You can set cookies which are required to use the main functionality without any kind of a banner, you only need a banner to track and hoard data.

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Yup. "We value your privacy, and would like to share it with 1438 of our corporate friends, please click accept to waive your privacy!"

Legally they can't even with a typical banner, since consent has to be specific and informed. There can be no informed consent when the banner presents 100+ data processors. The problem is that it's not enforced in any way.

I mean that's basically the same as saying it's because of the GPDR. People had these grand aspirations that the law would make companies change their behavior to not have the banner but that was daft. It just became another compliance checklist item.

The mistake was assuming companies can feel shame.

Why aren't people responding to the law in the way I want them to?! lol

The point is that the blame for those banners should be placed squarely on the websites that use them. If people are mad about them, they should be made at the website, not the GDPR.

That section in the GPDR didn't reduce tracking, it just added banners, and its removal would make the banners go away.

Legislate the behavior you want to see, not the behavior you hope will be a side-effect. You can't say, "the law is fine, it's the children that are wrong" when sites responded to the incentives they were placed under. The system finds an equilibrium at "everyone keeps doing exactly what they were doing before, just with a banner" and that's entirely the fault of the law. The incentives even go to far as to punish defectors because anyone who does right by their users loses money.

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