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

Correct URL: https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-...

> 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.

> Shame companies cannot live without tracking cookies

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.

> Most cookies are entirely benign. Many cookies (or something like a cookie) are required for a website to operate normally. The EU law was/is too broad - and has caused the entire world to be annoyed with useless 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.

You might try to argue many types of cookies are non-essential - but that would be because you lack experience in this domain.

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.

> 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.

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.

You have a right to not visit websites that you think are collecting to much information about you. That’s about it.