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Comment by edouard-harris | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

it's insane !

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