[saagarjha]

Isn't this pretty much what happened with the cookie law? It states that cookies necessary for the functioning of sites were ok, but everyone ended up putting up those warnings anyways and it greatly diluted any benefit of the rule and it ended up like Prop 65: warnings everywhere, even when they weren't useful. Overall, it just led to the law being ridiculed.

[JumpCrisscross]

We just added an EU surcharge to our pricing model. This isn’t a hard law to comply with, but you need a lot of business in Europe for re-factoring and lawyering up to make sense. Even if you do nothing dodgy, you’re going to need to be ready to handle incorrect requests and misguided complaints.

[CreepGin]

Wait what? Really? All the annoying "cookie" popups I've seen were them telling me the cookies were used for necessary function. I always thought it was due to some European law. Are you telling me it's not even required by the law?

[mrweasel]

What no one want to do was read the law. I actually had to do that, and how you dealt with it depended on your mindset. It was pretty clear that you could just disable all tracking and you'd be fine. If you wanted to use 3rd party tracking, using cookies, you'd need consent.

Because people wouldn't give up Google Analytics, targetted ads and "re-targetting" they opted of silly pop-ups, often delivered by a 3rd. party that will scan your site to keep track of all the data collectors your marketing department added without considering the users privacy.

The GDPR is written the way it is because companies refuse to accept the intentions of the cookie law, and choose to look for loopholes. At least that's my take.

[saagarjha]

If you're using cookies for storing stuff like login information, you don't need a cookie notice. If you're using cookies for tracking, you do need a notice.

[Pulcinella]

Correct. The “necessary” function was that the website and advertisers wanted to track you all over the web. Login cookies and the like don’t require notices so if you see a notice it was because they wanted to track you.

[Eupolemos]

I didn't even know that - thank you :)