[pjc50]

It's a deeply stupid local minimum that the EU has ended up in because they were afraid to mandate details, and also afraid to just ban tracking for advertising purposes altogether. So you end up with a situation where:

- most people are tracked on almost all websites by a small number of US megacorps (e.g. google analytics could probably reproduce complete browser histories for most Europeans, and most likely does for some intelligence agency)

- AND most people have their time wasted by consent banners

- AND small companies worry about compliance costs (my least favourite aspect of EU law is it doesn't understand the need to exclude small companies from complex requirements)

It's non-confrontational to a fault and therefore ineffective.