Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

Most cookies are entirely benign. Many cookies (or something like a cookie) are required for a website to operate normally. The EU law, while good intentioned, was/is too broad and failed to understand the realities of operating websites. This regulation has caused the entire world to be annoyed with useless cookie banners that 99% of people just reflexively click through - just like all of California's Prop65 warnings are ignored today.

> Don't store PII.

These hard-line statements defy reality. Many websites have legitimate need to store PII.

> You know the best way of not having to care about GDPR?

Don't be in the EU?

Just ignore it. There are no consequences. If you don't have physical presence within the EU - there's little-to-zero the EU can do about it. The EU can think it's laws apply to the world all it wants - but the world disagrees.

"Essential Cookies" do not need a consent banner.

Case in point: Hacker News is 100% compliant AFAIK and has no banner.

> Many websites have legitimate need to store PII.

If there is actual legitimate interest or legal requirements, such as collecting an address for delivering a package or performing fraud-prevention, there is also no need for cookie banners.

Give reading the actual implementations a try. You'll quickly notice they actually thought of this. I wouldn't say it's "expertly crafted" by any means, but the banner is for a specific "class" of cookies, not just "abc=123" as you seem to think.

Website operators have a right to study how people use their website just the same as a brick-and-mortar operator has the right to study how customers navigate their store isles.

The EU law compels a popup for these types of services/scripts and 99% of people just click through them because they are noise.

Lastly - the EU and it's laws don't matter. What are they going to do about non-compliant foreign websites? Nothing.

I'm not arguing anything, read the directives and implementations yourself, then get back to me. While some might lack experience, others seem to lack reading comprehension. That's fine, we can always learn :)

> Website operators have a right to study how people use their website

In the EU, that depends. As a website operator at a certain scale, you cannot do whatever you want with personal data.

> Lastly - the EU and it's laws don't matter. What are they going to do about non-compliant foreign websites? Nothing.

Yeah, I mean that's cool and all, but maybe you're spending time discussing in the wrong HN submission then? I don't go around in submissions about "Golang is bad" commentating how you wouldn't have those issues if you didn't use Golang in the first place. Not my idea of curious conversation at all.

Obviously EU directives and laws apply in EU

I think reasonable people can disagree about this, and if enough reasonable people think that a web site operator should not have that "right" then they should be able to pass legislation to curtail it.

As a user, I say I should have the right to control what data is collected by what company, and what they should be allowed to do with it. I should be empowered to decide what kind of data is "essential" for a company to collect about me, not the company. Reasonable people could disagree with me, too. These are not laws of physics.

The EU designed these regulations to be viral and compel the world into compliance. The world does not need to comply, and largely does not. Multinational corporations with physical presence within the EU need to comply - but nobody else does, nor should they.

> read the directives and implementations yourself, then get back to me.

So we're arguing this down-thread of an article claiming our fuzzy European friends wasted nearly 600,000,000 hours last year clicking "I Accept" over and over? Seems like a well-designed regulation that's totally working super-duper well for the EU. Totally cut down on cookies!

This can be done without a cookie banner, as long as no PII is collected for the purposes of that analysis.

Somehow people think visiting someone else's private website grants them privileges to be entirely anonymous - it does not anymore so than shopping in a physical retail store.

If we keep going down this path, websites will require a full ToS/EULA just to access the site...

Or, more common for ecommerce, "transferred" into an advertising algorithm so the business can gain more similar customers. Oh the horror!

If so, it is legitimate interest to do fraud prevention, so there's no need for a consent banner, first or third-party. Naturally you can't go and use this data for a purpose that has no basis under legitimate interest.

Another example: Cloudflare is running DDoS prevention under our noses here at HN, for example, but there's no need to ask for consent, even though Cloudflare is a third-party. Why? Because this is considered legitimate interest.

> Or, more common for ecommerce, "transferred" into an advertising algorithm so the business can gain more similar customers

For this you do need consent, if you transfer PII. If you don't want a banner you can replace it with a simple checkbox during the checkout process. Not only less hostile, but also more transparent than a banner.

To understand how customer's shop on my website. Heatmaps, view port, device type, screen resolution, frequency of browsing, where their mouse hovers the most, page dwell time, etc.

These are impossible tasks for most website operators to do themselves.

> For this you do need consent, if you transfer PII. If you don't want a banner you can replace it with a simple checkbox during the checkout process. Not only less hostile, but also more transparent than a banner.

Or... you can just ignore the EU because the EU doesn't matter. You know, like I originally asserted?

> If you don't want a banner you can replace it with a simple checkbox during the checkout process

This is the sort of mindset that crafted this poorly designed regulation in the first place. Most website operators are not going to willingly add a barrier at the final step of a conversion.

If you are going to use my property and resources - it's my rules or don't come. Pretty simple...

As for the rest, it's quite inflammatory and I don't know how it relates to my comment, so I'll refrain from answering.

Well, except for all the people in the eu. I'm pretty sure the eu does get to tell those people to do or not do things, online or not.

Sure, physical stores can do that in certain way, certainly they cannot reverse pickpocket GPS trackers into our pockets or stalk us around the city. You can ask your customers how they found about your store but they can lie or simply not answer. Cameras in the store? Fine. Cameras in the store bathroom? Not ok.

It is a legitimate interest to understand where your customers are coming from and this can be done without cookies in an anonymous fashion. Similarly, you can understand what people purchase together in an anonymous fashion. Cookies and PII aren't needed for any of this.

Cookies and PII are only necessary when you are trying to surreptitiously correlate people's purchase pattern with something that you shouldn't legitimately know like their sexuality or any given aspect of their identity.

> Lastly - the EU and it's laws don't matter. What are they going to do about non-compliant foreign websites? Nothing.

Rightly so. But if your third party processor is operating in the EU they will hold them liable for processing the data on EU citizens you send them without consent. That is between the EU and your provider.

Sounds like information that is not personally identifying - if handled well.