[meowfly]

No. The reason it exists is businesses get guidance from legislators and existing case law on what prevents you from running a foul of GDPR and the cookie banner is what we ended up with. If those banners did nothing, companies wouldn't include them. They are there as the lowest effort legal defense.

[diggan]

Again, the cookie banners have nothing to do with GDPR, where are people getting this misinformation from?! Was there a popular article saying we have those cookie banners because of GDPR, or what?

The banners are the result of much earlier directives that predate GDPR by a lot...

[meowfly]

It's not misinformation. Yes ePrivacy predates GDPR but it had no teeth. The reason your replies are full of people saying, "Our lawyers told us to implement it for GDPR" is because it was a minimal thing you could do to meet GDPRs emphasis of receiving consent from users for data stored in cookies. Basically the fear of fines from not being GDPR compliant forced companies add them.

I agree with you these cookie banners are not sufficient by the text, but in practice unless EU commission and courts make lawyers believe these banners are worthless, EU legal teams will still recommend them.

> What these two lines are stating is that cookies, insofar as they are used to identify users, qualify as personal data and are therefore subject to the GDPR.

https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

[ttepasse]

Further down on the page they rightly notice that strictly necessary cookies don't require consent. This mirrors the opinion of European Union's Article 29 Working Party back then: https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio...

gdpr.eu is by the way not an official resource of the European Union but by the Swiss Proton AG. They note down the page that gdpr.eu doesn’t constitute legal advice. Although they are correct in this case and your misunderstanding was in reading for future internet discussions I'd recommend not using private sources.