[jacquesm]

I disagree. If companies decide to take these laws in the worst possible way, far worse than any normal and sane person would anticipate the problem isn't with the law.

Take into consideration that these companies annoyed their users but blamed it on the politicians, which is pretty irrational behavior.

And here you are, still blaming the politicians. As a result the GDPR came into being which is far more strict, it too is being blamed as the reason why many companies have now decided to shut down service altogether as the easiest solution to comply, when obviously the alternative would be to simply stop tracking your users.

[jefftk]

> If companies decide to take these laws in the worst possible way, far worse than any normal and sane person would anticipate the problem isn't with the law.

Are you saying that before the 2002 ePrivacy Directive came out most people who thought about this wouldn't have predicted that companies would put up cookie banners?

[rightbyte]

The cookie nagging kinda worked for a while because EU bureaucrats bad. But I believe their was a general shift in realizing Google et al. spy on you where it backfired in the long term.

Users were way more naive at the time of cookie banners being introduced. Internet were still not a real IRL thing.

[jacquesm]

I think if you confronted your average user with what these companies collect in data behind the scenes they would be astounded. I've seen a lot of this stuff professionally and it is quite amazing that any of this is legal at all. The profiles that these companies have on private individuals are at a level that the intelligence services likely can not match, either in quantity or in quality.

[rightbyte]

To Joe Doe's defense it took way to long for me to realize Google stalked me on the web. Embarrassingly long. "Internet people" told me but I thought they were crackpots.

[ilyt]

And now due to law user can directly click to see list of dozen, sometimes over hundred companies the "accept" click gives access to their tracking