[indigo945]

Claiming tracking cookies as "necessary" is often illegal under the GDPR. This is an enforcement problem, not a problem with the law itself, or the EU.

"Necessary" means "necessary for fulfilment of the contract". Your name and address are necessary data when you order off Amazon, your clickstream is not.

[lazide]

If the content is free, monetizing you is clearly necessary (/s, kinda)

[skinkestek]

Monetizing is fine with me: There’s nothing stopping creators from showing relevant ads—ones they choose themselves. Sometimes I have even found myself wishing there had been an ad a few months ago for a software conference I just realized I missed.

If someone blogs about woodworking, show static ads for tools they actually use and love. If they're into programming, show JetBrains, cloud providers, or anything dev-adjacent. Totally fine by me.

The problem is that almost everyone defaults to Google Ads—which then serves me wildly irrelevant junk, think brain-melting pay-to-win mobile games or even scammy dating sites that have zero connection to the content I’m reading and zero relevance to my interests.

It’s not just noise, it’s actively degrading the experience.

[spoiler]

Ah I remember the good-old day when people were selling "ad spaces" on their sites that weren't obtrusive. And usually the ads were things the author approved of or even used

[kedean]

I miss the naive days of the million dollar homepage

[mr_toad]

Necessary means necessary to add it to the page for the project manager to collect their annual bonus.