Finally!
This is a loss for European citizens and small businesses and a win for the trillion dollar ecosystem of data abuse.
EU law requires you to use cookie banners if your website contains cookies that are not required for it to work. Common examples of such cookies are those used by third-party analytics, tracking, and advertising services.
[...] we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really."We use optional cookies to improve your experience on our websites and to display personalized advertising based on your online activity. If you reject optional cookies, only cookies necessary to provide you the services listed above will be used. You may change your selection on which cookies to accept by clicking "Manage Cookies" at the bottom of the page to change your selection. This selection is maintained for 180 days. Please review your selections regularly. "
Besides, you seem to be confusing something.
GDPR requires explicit explanation of each cookie, including these 1000s of trackers. It in no way bans these. This is just GDPR working as intended - some people want to have 1000s of trackers and GDPR makes them explain each one with a permission.
Maybe it would be nice to not have so many trackers. Maybe the EU should ban trackers. Maybe consumers should care about granular cookie permissions and stop using websites that have 1000s of them because its annoying as fuck. But some companies do prefer to have these trackers and it is required by GDPR to confront the user with the details and a control.
No. You asked How can you comply with the current requirements without cookie banners? Not How can you have trackers and comply with the current requirements without cookie banners? And don't use dark patterns would have answered this question as well.
Within the context of the discussion of if its malicious compliance or a natural consequence of the law. Obviously you could have a website with 0 cookies but thats not the world we live in. Maybe you were hoping GDPR would have the side effect of people using less cookies? It in no way requires that though.
I mean just think of it this way. Company A uses Scary Dark Pattern. EU makes regulation requiring information and consent from user for companies that use Scary Dark Pattern. Company A adds information and consent about Scary Dark Pattern.
Where is the malicious compliance? The EU never made tracker cookies or cookies over some amount illegal.
You ignored I said don't use dark patterns answered the question you meant to ask.
> Obviously you could have a website with 0 cookies but thats not the world we live in. Maybe you were hoping GDPR would have the side effect of people using less cookies?
We were discussing trackers. Not cookies.
> I mean just think of it this way. Company A uses Scary Dark Pattern. EU makes regulation requiring information and consent from user for companies that use Scary Dark Pattern. Company A adds information and consent about Scary Dark Pattern.
I will not think of it using an unnecessary and incorrect analogy. And writing things like Scary Dark Pattern is childish and shows bad faith.
> Where is the malicious compliance? The EU never made tracker cookies or cookies over some amount illegal.
The malicious compliance is the dark patterns you ignored. Rejecting cookies was much more complicated than accepting them. Users were pressured to consent by constantly repeating banners. The “optimal user experience” and “accept and close” labels were misleading. These were ruled not compliance in fact.[1] But the companies knew it was malicious and thought it was compliance.
Ignoring Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control and presenting a cookie banner is a dark pattern as well.
[1] https://techgdpr.com/blog/data-protection-digest-3062025-the...
Straw man argument.
The rule equally applies to sites with just one tracker and no dark patterns.
They generally don't, because you don't need banners to store cookies that you need to store to have a working site.
In other words, if you see cookie banner, somebody is asking to store/track stuff about you that's not really needed.
Cookie banners were invented by the market as a loophole to continue dark patterns and bad practices. EU is catching flak because its extremely hard to legislate against explicit bad actors abusing loopholes in new technology.
But yeah, blame EU.
And before you go all "but my analytics is needed to get 1% more conversion on my webshop": if you have to convince me to buy your product by making the BUY button 10% larger and pulsate rainbow colors because your A/B test told you so, I will happily include that in the category "dark patterns".
I hate how everyone and their mother ships all my data to google and others just because they can.
They're also inherently less trustworthy when it comes to valuations and due diligence, since you could falsify historical data yourself, which you can't do with Google.
Or assign the user an anonymous session cookie that lasts an hour but contains nothing but a random GUID.
Or simply pipe your log output through a service that computes stats of accessed endpoints.
None of this requires a cookie banner.
You can deduplicate but you cannot store or transmit this identity information. The derived stats are fine as long as it’s aggregated in such a way that preserves anonymity
So just take IP address, browser details, your domain name, and a random ID you stick in a 30 minute session cookie. Hash it together. Now you have token valid for 30 minutes you can use for deduplication but no way of tying it back to particular user (after 30 minutes). And yes, if the user changes browser preferences, then they will get a new hash, but who cares?
Not rocket science.
Sure you do if for example you want to know how many unique users browse your site per day or month. Which is one of the most commonly requested and used metrics.
> So just take IP address, browser details, your domain name, and a random ID you stick in a 30 minute session cookie.
That looks a lot like a unique identifier which does require a user's consent and a cookie banner.
> Now you have token valid for 30 minutes you can use for deduplication but no way of tying it back to particular user (after 30 minutes)
The EU Court of Justice has ruled in the past that hashed personal data is still personal data.
> And yes, if the user changes browser preferences, then they will get a new hash, but who cares?
It will also happen after 30 minutes have passed which will happen all the time.
> Not rocket science.
And yet your solution is illegal according to the GDPR and does still not fulfil the basic requirement of returning the number of unique users per day or month.
1. Necessary
2. Legitimate
3. Proportionate
4. Limited
If so, fire away you have nothing to fear but the limitations of your own compliance people.
We can say, "Wouldn't it have been nice if the bad UX of all these cookies organically led to the death of trackers," but it didn't. And now proponents of GDPR are blaming companies for following GDPR. This comes from confusing the actual law with a desired side effect that didn't materialize.
Not really, proponents of GDPR are aware that GDPR explicitly blocking trackers would be extremely hard as there is a significant gray area where cookies can be useful but non-essential, so you'd have to define very specifically what constitutes a tracker or do a blanket ban and hurt legitimate use-cases. Both are bad.
For some reason though people think that the body that institutes laws that try to make the world a better place, when loopholes are found and abused for profit, this is somehow the standard body making a mistake, rather than each individual profit-seeking loophole-abusing entity being the problematic and blame-worthy actor.
I never understand why, I guess you work somewhere that makes money off of this.
However, you are still required to provide a list of essential cookies and their usage somewhere on the website.
What about trackers which they want to set immediately on page load? Just separate prompts for each seems worse than 1 condensed view. You might say "but trackers suck - I don't care about supporting a good UX for them" and it would be hard to disagree. But I'm making the point that its not malicious compliance. It would be great if people didn't use trackers but that is the status quo and GDPR didn't make theme illegal. Simply operating as normal plus new GDPR compliance clearly isnt malicious. The reality is cookie banners everywhere was an inevitable consequence of GDPR.
It’s totally technically feasible to have a non-blocking opt-in box.
But sites effectively make a legally mandated opt-in dialog into an opt-out dialog by making it block the site. Blocking the page loading until the banner is dismissed is definitely malicious, and arguably not compliant at all.
And lets not get started on all the sites where the banner is just non-functional smoke screen.
No tracking, no banner.
Or respect the now deprecated DNT flag, no banner necessary.
Now we get DNT 2.0 and the website owner will once again maliciously comply.
But some companies prefer to have trackers. They are required by GDPR to explain each cookie and offer a control for permissions. They probably had trackers before GDPR too. So how is that malicious compliance? They are just operating how they did before except now they are observing GDPR.
It sounds like maybe you just want them to ban trackers. Or for people to care more about trackers and stop using websites with trackers (thereby driving down trackers) Great. Those are all great. But none of them happened and none of that is dictated by GDPR.
I remember the early day cookie banners of Tumbler accept all or deselect 200 tracking cookies by clicking each checkbox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track
Because that made more sense than the cookie banner ever did.
Edit: it looks like there is a legal alternative now: Global Privacy Control.
But this one alone opens the door to behavior similar to tracking cookies, where accepting all was easy and not accepting was hard af.
Instead of a different cookie pop-up on every single site you visit
>Instead of the central browser controls?
This is the central browser control. The header is how the browser communicates it to the websites.
Even EU government websites had annoying giant cookie banners.
Yet, some how the vast majority of HN comments defend the cookie banners saying if you don't do anything "bad" then you don't need the banners.
Those banners often list up to 3000 ”partners”.
I used to use an extension that let me whitelist which sites could set cookies (which was pretty much those I wanted to login to). I had to stop using it because I had to allow the cookie preference cookies on too many sites.
* Sadly the second is unmaintained, and lets localStorage stuff through. There are other extensions that have to be called in (I still need to hide referers and other things anyway.) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/forget_me_not.... I have the simultaneous desire to take the extension over or fork it, and the desire not to get more involved with the sinking ship which is Firefox. Especially with the way they treat extension developers.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... does a similar thing.
The problem with Ublock etc. is that just blocking breaks quite a lot of sites.
Cookies are a client-side technology.
Why does the government need to be involved?
The whole point of the consent popups is to inform the user about what is going on. Without legislation, you wouldn’t get that information.
Then you have the problem that if they are using a single cookie, you now can't block it because you need it to be set so it stops showing you the damn cookie banner every time, but meanwhile there is no good way for the user or the government to be able to tell what they're doing with the data on the back end anyway. So now you have to let them set the cookie and hope they're not breaking a law where it's hard to detect violations, instead of blocking the cookie on every site where it has no apparent utility to you.
But the real question is, why does this have anything to do with cookies to begin with? If you want to ban data sharing or whatever then who cares whether it involves cookies or not? If they set a cookie and sell your data that's bad but if they're fingerprinting your browser and do it then it's all good?
Sometimes laws are dumb simply because the people drafting them were bad at it.
Nobody. The law bans tracking and data sharing, not cookies specifically. People have just simplified it to "oh, cookies" and ignore that this law bans tracking.
From what I understand it specifically regards storing data on the user's device as something different, and then cookies do that so cookies are different.
It covers all data processing whether automatic or manual.
The law literally doesn't talk about cookies. Or any other ways of tracking. (well, it does. In the preamble. The regulation itself is tech agnostic)
--- start quote ---
(1) The protection of natural persons in relation to the processing of personal data is a fundamental right.
...
(6) Rapid technological developments and globalisation have brought new challenges for the protection of personal data. The scale of the collection and sharing of personal data has increased significantly. Technology allows both private companies and public authorities to make use of personal data on an unprecedented scale in order to pursue their activities. Natural persons increasingly make personal information available publicly and globally.
...
(14) The protection afforded by this Regulation should apply to natural persons, whatever their nationality or place of residence, in relation to the processing of their personal data.
...
(15) In order to prevent creating a serious risk of circumvention, the protection of natural persons should be technologically neutral and should not depend on the techniques used. The protection of natural persons should apply to the processing of personal data by automated means, as well as to manual processing, if the personal data are contained or are intended to be contained in a filing system.
...
(26) The principles of data protection should apply to any information concerning an identified or identifiable natural person.
...
(32) Consent should be given by a clear affirmative act establishing a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject's agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her, such as by a written statement, including by electronic means, or an oral statement. This could include ticking a box when visiting an internet website, choosing technical settings for information society services or another statement or conduct which clearly indicates in this context the data subject's acceptance of the proposed processing of his or her personal data. Silence, pre-ticked boxes or inactivity should not therefore constitute consent. Consent should cover all processing activities carried out for the same purpose or purposes. When the processing has multiple purposes, consent should be given for all of them. If the data subject's consent is to be given following a request by electronic means, the request must be clear, concise and not unnecessarily disruptive to the use of the service for which it is provided.
--- end quote ---
etc.
> (30) Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers provided by their devices, applications, tools and protocols, such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers such as radio frequency identification tags.
That is why: "In order to prevent creating a serious risk of circumvention, the protection of natural persons should be technologically neutral and should not depend on the techniques used."
Is your browser user agent string an "identifier"? It generally isn't unique, and requiring explicit consent to process it would cause a lot of trouble, but that and a few other things you could say the same thing about are collectively enough to be uniquely identifying.
Which is something different which they apparently hadn't considered and it's not clear how it's supposed to work. Do they become an identifier as soon as you have enough of them to uniquely identify someone? How do you even know when that threshold is passed? Does it require you to actually use them as an identifier, or is it enough just to have them because then they could be used retroactively? What if you provide a non-identifying subset of them to a third party in another jurisdiction who collects others from someone else and then combines them without explicitly notifying you?
They made a hash of it.
> The EPR was supposed to be passed in 2018 at the same time as the GDPR came into force. The EU obviously missed that goal, but there are drafts of the document online, and it is scheduled to be finalized sometime this year even though there is no still date for when it will be implemented. The EPR promises to address browser fingerprinting in ways that are similar to cookies, create more robust protections for metadata, and take into account new methods of communication, like WhatsApp.
If the thing they failed to pass promises to do something additional, doesn't that imply that the thing they did pass doesn't already do it?
And I mean, just look at this:
> Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user.
> Preferences cookies — Also known as “functionality cookies,” these cookies allow a website to remember choices you have made in the past, like what language you prefer, what region you would like weather reports for, or what your user name and password are so you can automatically log in.
So you don't need consent for a shopping cart cookie, which is basically a login to a numbered account with no password, but if you want to do an actual "stay logged in with no password" or just not forget the user's preferred language now you supposedly need an annoying cookie banner even if you're not selling the data or otherwise doing anything objectionable with it. It's rubbish.
Wouldn't that be a session cookie (which is a strictly necessary cookie for accessing a secure area) with no expiration?
> or just not forget the user's preferred language
Why would you store the language preference client site anyhow? Isn't a better place the user profile on the server? I use the same language for the same site no matter the device I am logged in.
The gdpr.eu website literally says that a cookie that allows the website to remember "what your user name and password are so you can automatically log in" is a functional cookie rather than a strictly necessary cookie.
> Why would you store the language preference client site anyhow?
You're not storing the language preference in the cookie, you're storing a cookie that identifies the user so that the server can remember their language preference.
Consider the two possible ways that this can work: 1) if the cookie identifies the user then using it for anything outside of the "strictly necessary" category requires the cookie banner, or 2) if the cookie is used for any strictly necessary purpose then you can set the cookie even if you're also using it for other purposes, in which case anyone can set a strictly necessary cookie and then also use the same cookie to do as much tracking as they want without your consent.
Both of these are asinine because if it's the first one they're putting things like remembering your language preference outside of the strictly necessary category and requiring the dumb cookie banner for that, but if it's the second one the law is totally pointless.
But one row before it mentions "such as accessing secure areas of the site.". If the secure cookie has 12 months validity, this is basically a different way to implement "remember username/password".
Besides, all my browsers (Firefox, Chrome) remember the users and passwords for all the site I access, so are we even talking about this? Is Safari that bad that it doesn't remember your user/password (no experience with that one)?
> You're not storing the language preference in the cookie, you're storing a cookie that identifies the user
Ok, I agree that for sites without username / password that will not work. On the other hand, personally I rarely end up on any site that is not in a language that I can read and on top the browser has a language preference : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/l... . So, in practice, I think there are extremely few cases for sites require a language cookie for a not authenticated user.
Which could be read as allowing session cookies but not ones that allow you to save your login if you come back later. But it's also kind of confusing/ambiguous, which is another problem -- if people don't know what to do then what are they going to do? Cookie banners everywhere, because it's safer.
> Ok, I agree that for sites without username / password that will not work.
How would it work differently for sites with a username and password? The login cookie would still identify the user and would still be used to remember the language preference.
Again, is there any browser nowadays that doesn't save the login? I don't know any, personally but I do not know all of them. And if they are, how much market share they have? (If I myself build tomorrow a browser without the functionality, that can't be an argument that the legislation is wrong...)
> How would it work differently for sites with a username and password?
Generally for sites where you use a username, the site will load from the server several information to display (ex: your full name to write "Hello Mister X", etc.). In the same request you can have the user preferences (theme/language/etc.), and the local javascript uses them to do whatever it needs to do. Even with a cookie, there needs to be some javascript to do some actions, so no difference.
Or you could just redirect via a URL that has the user preferences once he logged in (ex: after site knows you are the correct user it will redirect you to https://mysite.com?lang=en&theme=dark)
There are many technical solutions, not sure why everybody is so crazy about cookie (oh, maybe they think of the food! Yummy)
Blocking cookies locally doesn't allow you to easily discriminate between tracking and functional cookies. And even if the browser had a UI for accepting or rejecting each cookie, they're not named such that a normal user could figure out which are important for not breaking the website, and which are just for tracking purposes.
By passing a law that says "website providers must disambiguate" this situation can be improved.
There are a LOT of shades of gray when it comes to website tracking and HN commenters refuse to deal with nuance.
Imagine running a store, and then I ask you how many customers you had yesterday and what they are looking at. "I don't watch the visitors - it's unnecessary and invasive". When in fact, having a general idea what your customers are looking for or doing in your store is pretty essential for running your business.
Obviously, this is different than taking the customer's picture and trading it with the store across the street.
When it comes to websites and cookie use, the GDPR treated both behaviors identically.
Server logs can provide this information.
Realistically, you want to know things like, how many users who looked at something made a purchase in the next 3 days? Is that going up or down after a recent change we made?
Many necessary business analytics require tracking and aggregating the behavior of individual users. You can't do that with server logs.
Businesses existed before tracking individuals was practical. Wanting something does not make it necessary.
> Realistically, you want to know things like, how many users who looked at something made a purchase in the next 3 days? Is that going up or down after a recent change we made?
Metrics like this had little benefit sales did not in my experience. And tracking might be acceptable if it stopped there.
I personally find the commercial targeting extremely poor. I look for things to buy and I get stupid ads which don't fit, or I bought the things and still bombarded with the ad for the same thing.
But data collection can be used by far more nefarious purposes, like political manipulation (already happening). So yes, I am willing to give up some percentage points in optimizing the commercial and advertisement process (for your example, wait for 2 weeks and check for the actual sales volume difference) to prevent other issues.
And no, you can't just "wait 2 weeks and check for the actual sales volume difference". The example I gave requires individual anonymized tracking. Pretty much anything that has to do with correlations in customer behavior requires individual tracking. And that's how businesses improve.
Also, it's not just giving up "some percentage points". There are a huge number of small businesses that can only exist because Facebook ads work so well in targeting very precise customer segments who would never know about their product otherwise. Targeting advertising does actually work, and you'd be putting tons of small business owners out of work if you got rid of it.
What I see though is many shops closing, because more and more people buying online. What I hear is people buying crap from Amazon and throwing it very fast, or using fast fashion from the like of Shein. Neither seem to me a great outcome.
I did a cursory look and I found this https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/22/a-look-at... , will quote "The number of high-propensity business applications – those that are highly likely to turn into businesses with payrolls – remained relatively stable between 2009 and 2019,". This for me does not support the idea that of "huge number" that only exist due to Facebook (business exits have also grown over the period, more data at https://data-explorer.oecd.org/), but of course this is an interpretation.
Because that’s how it is. For instance why does a site need to share my data with over 1000 "partners“?
And the EU uses the same tracking and website frameworks as others so they got banners automatically.
It wasn’t a mistake but website providers maliciously complied with the banners to shift the blame.
Seems you fell for it.
Europe's cookie nightmare is crumbling. EC wants preference at browser level - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45979527 - Nov 2025 (80 comments)
Besides how many sites actually have this as the only reason for cookies? Every time I get a new cookie banner I check it and there's always lots of data shared with "trusted partners". Even sites of companies that purely make money off their own products and services and shouldn't need to sell data. Businesses are just addicted to it.
The only provision I like is that they may only ask once every 6 months. However personally I wish that they'd make it a requirement to honour the do not track flag and never ask anything in that case. The common argument that browsers turn it on by default doesn't matter in the EU because tracking should be opt-in here anyway so this is expected behaviour. The browsers would quickly bring the flag back if it actually serves a purpose.
I'll keep blocking all ads and tracking anyway.
I would on the other hand ask if I should really set my "preferred language" on every device I log in ?! Why not store it server side (not to mention, why not use the browser language selection to start with).
I do agree with you that most of the cookies we talk about are not at all "preference cookie"...
the issue were the 100s of tracking cookies and that websites would use dark patterns or simply not offer a "no to all" button at all (which is against the law, btw.)
Most websites do. not. need. cookies.
It's all about tracking and surveillance to show you different prices on airbnb and booking.com to maximise their profits.
https://noyb.eu/en/project/cookie-banners (edit: link)
And BTW because I don't care about your cookies, I don't need to bother you with cookie banner. It's that easy.
Also, if I would implement user management for whatever reason, I would NOT NEED to show the banner also. ONLY if I shared the info with third side. The rules are simple yet the ways people bend them are very creative.
You do not need cookies for either of these. CSS can follow browser preferences, and browsers can change font sizes with zoom.
I am not sure these cookies are covered by the regulations. No personal so not covered by GDPR. They might be covered by the ePrivacy directive (the "cookie law").
I talked with our then national information law official (funny fact, same person is currently president of our country), rule of thumb is if you're not using your users' personal data to pay for other people's services (e.g Google analytics) or putting actual personal data in them, you're generally fine without the banner.
Further, if you're a small shop or individual acting in good faith and somehow still violated the law, they will issue a warning first so you can fix the issue. Only the blatant violations by people who should've known better will get a fine instantly (that is the practice here, anyway, I assumed that was the agreement between EU information officers)
All websites need cookies, at least for functionality and for analytics. We aren't living in the mid-1990s when websites were being operated for free by university departments or major megacorps in a closed system. The cookie law screwed all the small businesses and individuals who needed to be able to earn money to run their websites. It crippled everyone but big megacorps, who just pay the fines and go ahead with violating everyone's privacy.
What is not fine is giving away your users' personal data to pay for your analytics bill.
That isn't how people work. The law was poorly written and even more poorly enforced. Attempts at "compliance" made the web browsing experience worse.
I just checked the major institutional EU websites listed here[0], and every single one (e.g., [1][2][3]) had a different annoying massive cookie banner. In fact, I was impressed I couldn't find a single EU government website without a massive cookie banner.
I don't know if it is due to the law enforcement being so weak (or if the law itself is at fault or whatever else). But it seems like something is not right (either with your argument or EU), given the EU government itself engages in this "lawbreaking" (as defined by you) on every single one of their own major institutional websites.
The potential reason you brought up of "law enforcement is just weak" just seems like the biggest EU regulatory environment roast possible (which is why I don't believe it to be the real reason), given that not only they fail to enforce it against third parties (which would be at least somewhat understandable), but they cannot even enforce it on any of their own first party websites (aka they don't even try following their own rules themselves).
0. https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/european-union/official-ser...
1. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en
What do you mean? The original post mention 1000 cookies and no button to reject them. The sites you mention do have only two buttons (accept/reject). So they are following the law and not engaging in dark patterns.
I honestly haven't found the banners on EU websites any less annoying or cumbersome than those on shady operators' sites.
Definitely a failure of enforcement, but let's not pretend that was good faith compliance from operators either
Malicious compliance made the web browsing experience worse. That and deliberately not complying by as much as sites thought they could get away with, which is increasing as it becomes more obvious enforcement just isn't there.
I hate that the psychotic data harvesting assholes behind all these dark patterns emerged victorious by just straight up lying to people and deluding them into thinking GDPR was the issue, and not them and their shitty dark pattern banners