Th EU trying to rewrite the issue as concerning "consent" is thus idiotic, and innevitably lead to the cookie banner issue. The situation with cookies is even worse, because unlike with money, most people have no idea what a website even uses their data for. We recognize that, individually, most people would rather pay less, but that we collectively benefit when businesses are profitable.
When someone is asked to pay for an item at the store, we don't say that they should also have the choice to take the item for free, and only pay for it if they want to. The "informed consent" framing of this issue is quite ridiculous. But when you put it as "do you want to be tracked", of course it sounds bad, so all else being equal most people will say "no". There is also a incredibly minor way that they are worse off, in that some of their data (consisting of a field that says when they viewed certain news articles) might show up in a data leak in the future. There is a general sense in which the average individual benefits from the "more money" option websites are better funded, they can provide better services, etc. The option for the company is between the "more money" and "less money" option. We should thank the UE a 1000 times to reveal who are the bad players.
Those corps chose to make the web terrible a little bit more every day: tracking, auto play, scroll hijacking, dark patters, cookie banners. In fact, some banner are crafted to make rejection the hardest path for this very reason. So the banner is just the most annoying way that is legally allowed to try to get people to force-accept tracking. It's like when politician says it's "for the children" or "to fight terrorists". Who are you kidding? This tracking is not benefiting us. Solved.īecause the vast majority of people would not consent. So if I have DNT=1 set in my browser, pop a quick non modal notification saying "we wants to track you but but we won't because you said not to. There is nothing in the EU law that requires a banner, only informed consent. Indeed, corporations can follow the "Do Not Track" header. These shenanigans are not required, they are very much designed on purpose. Everytime I read about this, it makes me think about this game: