| I agree that a cookie banner is pointless. But they are even on government websites, so obviously something has gone terribly wrong along they way (hint: lobbyism). My thinking goes like this: 1. The law explicitly talks of requesting consent. 2. Incentives will drive actors to request additional permissions if possible (you always get some legal, can claim ignorance, etc) 3. People get constant intrusions wasting our collective time and attention on an enormous scale. The current law is encouraging this type of user-hostile behavior. This is stating an objective fact, since the current situation is clearly a result of the current law. If any type of consent-banner or opt-in method is allowed, industry groups will lobby for loopholes they can use to trick users using whatever mechanism the law leaves at their disposal. Just outright ban the use of cross-site tracking and user profiling. We don't have a societal need for this to be legal. |
Other examples of where cross-site tracking is useful is for preventing online payments fraud. You have a similar IRL version of this where your bank will freeze your card if it sees purchases being made in different countries simultaneously.
Somewhere along the line, counting views or helping reduce fraud for customers turned into “store full demographic information about someone who never signed up for our service”, which is where everything went wrong in my mind. The cookies themselves aren’t the problem, it’s how they’re being used.