Europeans Spend 575M Hours Clicking Cookie Banners Every Year | Hacker News Reader

Europeans Spend 575M Hours Clicking Cookie Banners Every Year

legiscope.com

25 pointsThiebaut28 comments

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The worst part is, there is no need to have cookie banner if you avoid unnecessary tracking.

Even today you go on websites and there are 20-30 trackers, often duplicating functionalality.

Or reCAPTCHA, Google Tag Manager or others.

You can get same level of experience and functionality without these tools.

Either by more EU friendly alternatives or simply by using none.

We often help customers stop using Cookie Banners for web analytics. Some end up ditching them altogether. There is almost universal agreement that it feels better to the user and more (yes more) data is visible for website owners.

Few tools are as practical as google analytics for example, which requires cookies

I find it weird that the big "problem" is setting cookies on the visitor's device and not that you send all your visitors' data/stats and browsing patterns to Google...

They don't have to ask about setting cookies if these cookies are necessary to run the page.

They need to ask because they are planning to use people's data for other purposes. These are the folks wasting people's time with cookie banners.

Let's be real, they are not going to stop doing that, so now we're stuck with a shitty law and a shitty internet experience.

I use an extension called "I still don't care about cookies", and without it, the web is rage inducingly unbrowsable in Europe.

I just do not want to be tracked in random databases. We should not resign on basic decency. This nagware must be stopped either by public pressure or by more regulation.

There was time when spyware was not tolerated. We need to bring that back. This article is doing the opposite. Normalizing spyware while blaming the regulation.

If this nagware is on site that I consider valuable I try to email them about this immoral behaviour. But most of the time it is just reminder that I actually do not need to see the site and close the tab.

Most people do not care they just want to procrastinate effectively without clicking on banner.

If accurate, this is an extraordinary statistic:

> Assuming a full-time worker dedicates approximately 2,000 hours annually, 575,000,000 hours ÷ 2,000 hours/FTE = 287,500 FTEs. This means the overall cost of clicking on cookie banners is equivalent to a company of 287,500 employees spending an 8-hour workday clicking on cookie banners.

For comparison, there are apparently around 200M employees in the EU (part time plus full time) [1]. So if this is true, around 0.1% of the bloc's productive capacity is dedicated to clicking on cookie banners.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1197123/full-time-worker...

Sure, but most of that is while doing a lot of casual surfing where any kind of cost may be beneficial. I.e. by just clicking through to the save default button, I find it much easier to realize I want to drop off low quality sites such as comparison sites that have clearly gone into affiliation. The time I would have spent wasn't going to magically help the economy (of a non-US country anyway), it was going to transfer some wealth around and add to social problems.

it's insane !

The analysis is pure BS.

"On average, a user visits about 100 websites per month, totaling 1,200 websites per year."

First, that is not in the cited link. The word "month" isn't even present.

There is the line 'In the US, the average internet user browses over 100 different web pages on a daily basis.", but that cites a blog post from 2007 ... which include numbers for dialup users(!)

Second, if users visit 100 new and distinct websites in one month that does not mean they visit 100 new and distinct web sites every single month. You've got DuckDuckGo and HN and Codeberg and your Mastodon instance, which you visit every day.

And once you've said to allow or disallow tracking, the web site can, you know, remember the answer for next time. Using a cookie.

However, unless you agree to the banners, you'll see the banner each and every time you visit the site. Assuming you're not using some extension that gets around that of course.

There are two issues there.

First, do you think most people mentioned in this analysis select "I Agree" or "Decline Cookies". I'm pretty sure most people select the former, in part to avoid being asked again.

Second, asking each and every time is a deliberate dark UI pattern, and if not already illegal - which I suspect it is - should be. The blame for the user time wasted selecting "Decline" every day should not be attributed to the law, but to the web site owner who want that extra bit of surveillance capitalism cash, and to the web developers who enable this practice.

I find it especially ridiculous when the site insists on displaying the banner to me, when my browser is configured to reject all cookies...

Needs cookies to save your preferences on some sites... it's cookies all the way down.

The biggest reason I haven't seen mentioned here is that these cookie banners are run by a few large advertising management entities. They are aggressive about it, because clicking consent on one site will consent for every site that is managed by that entity. But they have to show it for sites you haven't visited.

For example, the user:

- Visits site "A", gets a popup banner managed by "Shady Ad Manager", clicks Do not consent.

- Visits site "B", gets a popup banner managed by "Shady Ad Manager", clicks Do not consent.

- Visits site "C", gets a popup banner managed by "Shady Ad Manager", makes a mistake and clicks "Consent" through the employment of some shady dark pattern.

- Is now being tracked by "A" and "B", because it is managed by "Shady Ad Manager", but when returning to "A" and "B", has no chance to opt out anymore.

... and almost none of them need to exist. Websites already have permission to do tracking essential for the site work. No banner needed.

But the only way they get to collect prying metrics, do unnecessary analysis of them and sell on the tracking results to enrich themselves, is with your consent. So they'll hound you night and day for that consent, and use every trick in the book to get it.

This study highlights the cost that website owners push onto society in pursuit of their own personal enrichment.

> Exemptions from cookie banners for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) using analytics, tracking user interactions on their websites, and managing basic advertising are imperative to mitigate unnecessary economic and productivity losses.

Uh no, how about the opposite. How about outlawing analytics, tracking user interactions and managing basic advertising... and therefore the cookie banners don't need to appear either, because privacy is mandated by law, rather than being something you can opt out of if suitably harrassed.

I wish politicians would engage in fixing the issue of dark patterns with these cookie banners, enforce a fast-reacting popup containing "accept", "only essentials", "customize".

And these popups should also require to mention if the article which you're hoping to read requires a subscription or not, because they're basically tricking you into accepting site-wide cookies for articles which you then can't read.

Ideally browsers would have an API where I can use the settings of the browser to pre-configure my answers, and that websites are required to ask the API instead of presenting me a home-built dialog. Browsers do this for cameras, microphones and all kind of privacy sensitive things, so why not for cookies?

Yes surely we can legislate our way out of this one. Wait how did we get here?

It was an important step.

Regardless if that number is accurate or not, this GDPR cookie notification requirement is such a perfect example of trying to do some good and making everything worse. Anyone who is obsessive about pushing back on tracking does so through a more comprehensive set of means than taking the time to click through the "trust us when we say there these are just the essential cookies" (even if it even gives you an option). For the vast majority of people all it does is get in the way and, most importantly, makes no difference to behavior or outcome.

For me that particular requirement genuinely cannot die soon enough.

The notification isn't the issue. It's user-tracking which is the issue, combined with companies breaking the GDPR by making it harder to deny consent than to grant consent.

I really do not want to help a company 'facilitate web analytics, understand user behavior, manage ad efficiency, or keyword traffic', so I always click "do not agree".

Many companies make it harder to say "do not agree", and waste my time by taking me to another page with sometimes a scroll-list that I must navigate to individually turn off items.

If there are too many, I will close the page.

So if this analysis about '575 Million Hours Clicking Cookie Banners Every Year' is true and meaningful, the #1 way to improve it is to have a big "do not track me" button that anyone can click on, and a small "track me please" for those who want to help the company.

Analysis of the economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe, including country-specific estimates and legal insights into the outdated EU Directive 2002/58.

I’m spending maybe one minute a day clicking Cookie banners. While people in the US spend two hours more every day driving a car. So when put into perspective, it does not seem such a big deal (though Cookie banners suck for sure, and from a PR perspective they are bad for the image of mostly effective EU regulation efforts in many other areas).

Also: if "Reject all" isn't obviously placed, I usually think for a second whether I am curious enough to bother rejecting usages individually or whether I rather don't care. Usually I don't care and leave.

EU really dropped the ball on this one, this should've been a browser setting you set once.

It was completely obvious from day one that companies would dark pattern the hell out of this to make people default to accepting.

The underlying assumption is that the average European internet user visits 1200 unique web sites a year. That seems a high estimate to me.

Bring back the do-not-track header

It's like solving a CAPTCHA to prove I'm European

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