Europe’s (really Ireland’s) lacklustre enforcement of GDPR means it has hurt European companies (which at least try to comply) without even meaningfully improving privacy. Subject access requests are fun at least.
Oh, aren't many of big tech's EU HQs in Ireland?
In the EU, they've had the GDPR – a big, muscular privacy law – for nine years, and all it's really done is drown the continent in cookie-consent pop-ups. But that's not because the GDPR is flawed, it's because Ireland is a tax-haven that has lured in the world's worst corporate privacy-violators, and to keep them from moving to another tax haven (like Malta or Cyprus or Luxembourg), it has to turn itself into a crime-haven. So for the entire life of the GDPR, all the important privacy cases in Europe have gone to Ireland, and died there:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech...
Now, again, this isn't a complicated technical question that is hard to resolve through regulation. It's just boring old corruption. I'm not saying that corruption is easy to solve, but I am saying that it's not complicated. Irish politicians made the country's economy dependent on the Irish state facilitating criminal activity by American firms. The EU doesn't want to provoke a constitutional crisis by forcing Ireland (and the EU's other crime-havens) to halt this behavior.
How does that make the EU regulation something bad? The bad thing is that the companies are willing to bombard us with the worst possible cookie banners, in order to monetize our visits.
Maybe the next EU regulation should be to prohibit those banners and allow companies to add a small toggle somewhere on their site so we can toggle it to allow them to set 3rd-party cookies.
The EU's own government websites [1] are littered with the same cookie banners. They want the visitor data just as bad as everyone else.
> Maybe the next EU regulation
We don't need anymore EU regulations seeing how bad and thoughtless they already are.
Try and speak for yourself. No need to speak on everyone's behalf, this is disingenuous.
Sure, I don't understand why they don't remove it if they know that an average-iq'd person would accept only essential cookies, but that cookie banner belongs to the top 5% of friendly cookie banners.
I was talking about those you find on the typical website, usually news sites, who make them as annoying as possible.
They're not the problem, they never have been. It's the fact that so many parts of the modern internet rely on selling user data to make a profit, not the regulation that they now have to do the outrageous thing and (gasp) ask for consent first.
If the law would force them to say "Do you want Larry Ellison to get richer by looking through your webcam? [Yes] [No]" it would be a good law.