[lucideer]

I think a lot of the confusion around the consent banner stuff arises from the 2002 EU ePrivacy Directive (ePD)[0] which long predates GDPR.

ePD introduced the idea of the cookie consent banners we see today.

While it was enacted in 2002, ePD didn't really start to come into broad legal force in many member states until ~2010ish (EU Directives are not like federal laws; instead they're implemented & enforced by individual member states separately).

GDPR's focus on prior consent makes consent banners in their popular format largely useless, but when GDPR came along, the intent was that PD should have been replaced by the accompanying EU ePrivacy Regulation (ePR)[1] to clarify this. ePR has been delayed, so we're in this ambiguous place.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Electronic_Communi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Regulation