Those “cookie banners” are nonsense aimed at getting this outcome.
This is a loss for European citizens and small businesses and a win for the trillion dollar ecosystem of data abuse.
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.