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

> This situation calls for an urgent revision of the ePrivacy Directive

Shame companies cannot live without tracking cookies, and shame that the blame somehow end up on the regulation, rather than the companies who are the ones who introduce this cookie banner and "massive productivity loss".

You know the best way of not having to put up cookie banners on your website? Don't store PII in cookies. You know the best way of not having to care about GDPR? Don't store PII.

I hear this a lot. As an American that hosts casual personal websites, I can't help but worry that I'm in violation of the GDPR.

For example, my router logs connections for debugging. And my NGinx server maintains server logs for debugging.

These contain IP addresses. I'm pretty sure those are considered PII under GDPR. And there are a lot of things I think that follow from that, things I haven't bothered to look into or implement. Like whatever policies, disclaimers, notifications, request handling processes, etc. that need to be in place to gather those logs.

Whether or not I need a registered agent in the EU to host my website seems to be rather fuzzy too. It seems to come down to how "sensitive" the data I store in my logs are?

Its also not clear to me whether my home router is subject to GDPR if it receives and logs a packet that was sent to it by an EU citizen, regardless of whether there was a public internet service hosted on that router or not.

I mostly choose to not think about these things - but that nagging concern that my entire self-hosted digital presence violates European law does linger.

GDPR is intentionally obfuscated and made scary by people who have an interest in others thinking the regulation is onerous and silly (so that it is eventually changed/removed).

The regulation is not very hard to read, I would recommend you do it if you haven’t and boils down to: “don’t pass on (process) information without informed consent, if someone requests that you remove their account you should do so- and also don’t keep records around, and do your best not to let anyone access personal information”, the last one is technically unenforceable, but exists to prevent people leaving open access to data processors and bypassing consent more than anything else. A secondary benefit is that people take access controls a little more seriously by forcing breach disclosures.

Even the cookie banners are not needed unless you’re setting cookies for data collection, especially for third-parties!

There is a distinct irony in that all the online simplifications (“gdpr for dummies”, “the 7 things to comply with for gdpr”) are misleading and harder to read than the actual text of the regulation.

EDIT; I was foolish to post this during the peak time for US people. It feels like the Americans want the GDPR to be perceived as a pain.