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Comment by Sander_Marechal | Hacker News Reader

That's nonsense. It's not about the cookies, it's about the data collection. You can use cookies without having to use a cookie banner by simply not gathering data you don't need. And if you do gather that data without using cookies you still need to ask for consent.

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I can tell you, with absolute certainty, that nobody knows how to implement the law or what it even means, legislators, lawyers, engineers alike. There was a good somewhere and now we're in hell.

Nah, companies don't want to implement it as it's bad for their business model so they feign ignorance.

I still remember being at an all hands at a former employer where the team presenting the revised cookie banners promoted as a benefit that it had opt in rates that would make an authoritarian dictator embarrassed to claim as uninfluenced

Considering the dozens of European governments that have been fined under the GDPR, I think it's safe to say that it's not just feigned ignorance.

You're right in the sense that it tends to be hard to understand things when your salary depends on you not understanding them. This seems to describe most web developers from the number of non-compliant consent popups in the wild.

Can you give an example?

If your claim is that sites that use cookie banners don't understand the law, I don't know how we square that claim with the European Commission site's cookie banner. Certainly, the government itself can interpret the law successfully, right?

As someone who was helping to implement GDPR for clients when it took effect, it was a nightmare. We didn’t know exactly what to do, or when, or where, or to whom. The easiest solution for a lot of the implantations was “do the most so we don’t miss something, and pull back bits as we know more”.

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