It is impossible to go anywhere in a technology space online without hitting a wave of commentary about how stupid GDPR is. It was written by bureaucrats who don’t understand the amazing potential of unrestricted technology. These US-based critiques almost always lean on the oldest trick in cyberlibertarianism: we don’t have time to regulate, we must simply adapt and ride the wave. Nobody has time for government.
Of all GDPR’s consequences, none gets more attention than the cookie banner, which critics present as the inevitable result of government meddling. Blaming GDPR for the cookie banner is like blaming the health inspector for the roaches. The banner is deliberate vandalism, a dark pattern engineered to exhaust you before you can learn anything about the surveillance apparatus humming behind the “OK.” Ironically the banner designed to hide the machine has taught the public more about the machine than a thousand podcasts ever will. Even non-technical people stop at “your data is shared with 996 partners.”
↫ Mat Duggan
There is so much misinformation about the cookie banner, it’s honestly quite hard to believe it’s not deliberately spread. You don’t need a cookie banner for functional cookies, so as long as you don’t share your users’ data with anyone else, you don’t need a cookie banner at all. On top of that, most cookie banners you encounter are actually not compliant with the GDPR at all, because they don’t present a single-click option to block your data from being shared with those 996 partners.
What the cookie banner has done is inform millions – maybe even billions – of people the world over of just how insipid the online advertising and data harvesting industry really is. It put the issue on the map, and by now, everyone, no matter their level of computer literacy, is fully aware of what’s happening to their data every time they see one of these (non-compliant) banners. No else had the guts to do this – except for the European Union.
The wider GPDR has set the baseline for online privacy protections, and while we have a long way to go before we’ve fully solved this issue, the EU at least gave us a good point to jump off from. Smoking and asbestos weren’t banned in a day, either.
Oh man. I had almost forgotten about those popups, thanks to the Consent-O-Matic extension for Firefox.
Works on Firefox Mobile, too. That and uBlock Origin make browsing the web sooooo much more convenient.
Legislation that results in just about every website on the Internet flashing a banner in my face notifying me that they give zero fucks about my privacy is not what I would consider to be good legislation. Esp. since I already knew that beforehand.
Thanks, EU.