[hollowturtle]

I always wondered though why a website in the eu, for the love of their users, won't just drop cookie usage and instrusive third party scripts. Just do analytics on the backend and don't set any cookie, except for tokens in authenticated areas

[tempestn]

You can't even save user preferences (like language or other settings) without showing a cookie banner. Edit: I was mistaken. You can't save inferred preferences, but can save explicit user-saved options.

And for a serious website, front end analytics are kind of a necessity to understand how users interact with pages and improve the experience. Note that it certainly doesn't require tracking the behaviour of individual users, just understanding how controls are used in aggregate.

I know it seems like you could work around this with careful design and maybe focus groups and such, but I can tell you we regularly uncover surprising insights from (aggregate) trends in front-end events.

[dgellow]

That's not true and is a very common misinformation people repeat online. You can save user preferences in cookies without any consent banner, if the cookie isn't used for tracking.

See here[0], page 6:

> As stated in Article 5(3) ePD: ‘This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.’

0: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/documents/2024-10/ed...

As long as you do not share that info with 3rd party, and the user requested it, you can store via cookies pretty much whatever you want without the need for a consent screen

[tempestn]

You're right; I haven't looked into this in detail in some time. You can't save inferred preferences, but can save things that the user has explicitly selected to save.

[jeroenhd]

They don't want love, they want money. Tracking people is an effective way to make money. You can make some money with non-tracking ads, but these websites want more money than that.

Good websites sharing stuff for the fun of it rarely ever add these obnoxious banners. They probably should if they embed other trackers (like Youtube or Google Fonts) but often just don't. It's only the ones that want to make money off you that bother putting in the obnoxious banners.

[bux93]

Even if you only use first-party analytics, you're still tracking users and may still pipe that data to third parties, so you still need a lawful basis for processing PII (of which consent is the least useful one).

Even the use of the word "cookie" is framing by industry to confuse people.

[jeremyjh]

They don't love you. They want to track you and make a tiny amount of money off that. Also, they want to hire cheap incompetent staff who don't understand what all the analytics shit they are putting on the website even does.

[reddalo]

That's what I'm doing with a service I made. But I don't have any ads, and ad-supported websites can't easily do that.

[tappio]

There are privacy respecting ad brokers that dont require user tracking. Its just that people are too lazy or greedy to use those.