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

While I appreciate your workarounds, the issue is not fixed. Almost everyone is going to keep clicking these stupid banners. It’s not okay, it’s not fixed until the rules are adjusted and we have less tracking and’s less pointless banners.

So many pop-ups these days, for every little thing. Tracking. OS permissions. Browser permissions. Take a survey. Speak to our AI assistant. Do you agree to this. Donate. Sign up. Pay. So many clicks. Used to be viruses, but we have the same result with our complexity.

It's not complex. It's simple. It's greed. It's absolutely ridiculous that we as a species put up with all of this nonsense because we have a faulty foundational understanding of what is and should be normal. The brain rot that we've subjected ourselves to is absolutely ludicrous.

So remove the consent exception against tracking? Simply make it illegal, banner or no?

You're right, but I can't fix that. What I can do is help HN readers who didn't know about that filter list. Maybe they can help the people they know.

It’s not a tracking banner but a cookie banner and some applications have a legitimate need for cookies. They abuse what is legitimate, but you can’t ask regulators to check every site without a national (European?) white liste firewall (shouldn’t give them ideas…).

Also, most tracking used to use cookies but if that becomes illegal there’s others ways.

Cookies necessary to function properly don't require consent. It's only optional ones (ones that benefit the site, not the user).

And these (optional ones) don't require a banner.

How do you figure? How does the user opt in or out without an option to opt in or out?

the same way that they interact with any other web page? which never need banners? You don't need a banner to opt in or out (or ignore).

By this I mean the law is what it is but the implementation is deliberately hurting the visitors in the hope that they will click "yeah sure whatever" to be let through to the content. The harm does not come from the legislation but is deliberately anti-user by the web site owner. (Fine, in some cases it might be out of the box and merely lazy.)

I don’t know how to fix it, but I know it isn’t fixed now. We have both tracking and cookie banners.

Most of them I don’t get because I don’t use a user hostile operating system.

And it’s not really complexity, it’s deliberate choices being made.

The internet used to be run by technologists.

Now it’s run by project managers and web monkeys

I’m happy! I didn’t know about it! Thx

Do Not Track header? It's the silver bullet but the stakeholders will argue it is invalid and cannot possibly be used to inform the server that the client wishes not to be tracked

Someone needs to put a stake in those stakeholders.

The only way to permanently rid yourself of information vampires.

Right but that's not optional cookies functioning at all, that's simply rejecting them altogether. Why not just say that? It's also a much easier sentiment to agree with than these confusing semantics about optional cookies working fine if you just ignore the banner.

You can always find disagreement if you look for it. Maybe this is your thing, given user name, your account makes an interesting study on it. Though in this case, I wouldn't be so reductive. Not all complexity (I ascribe to the result) is due to bad intentions (e.g. greed). There's also the EU GDPR trying to protect kids. AI assistant might be a tool to try to help users. If you want to simplify the cause here, how about a lack of focus or failure to tame the complexity of the world with our technologies, or tendency to add rather than delete?

Why do we need to protect kids? Greed. Why do we need AI to help people? Greed.

It's not complex. There are complex things but understanding the cause of business doing business is not complex. It's simple.

If you break things down in this way, the result is discontent, not a solution.