Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites

Or just ban this kind of data collection. Is there any reason anyone would willingly click "Accept" when a website asks to share your data with 500+ partner sites?

For that matter, companies should be banned from referring to selling off your data to random spam companies as "sharing with partners." Partners comes with an implication of being somewhat equal or at least on trusting terms. The companies selling our data don't trust these companies. They probably don't even know their names.

If the data is being sold, it should be legally required to word it in that way. If there's even the slightest possibility of your data being leaked to spammers, it should be worded to reflect that.

"Do you consent to us selling your data to any party that wishes to buy your data? Do you consent to the possibility that your data will be used to spam you or steal your identity in the future? Yes/No"

The word "partner" lost its meaning completely. Each business relation is a "partner" these days. Guess it sounds nicer than "company that pays me to do stuff and bug you about"

I'm not sure all these relationships are monetary.

It may even be the case that the website pays X company to perform the tracking for their own analytics purposes. Or that it's X company's own freemium model where if you add their tracker they grant you a bunch of cross-site information for free.