> Yet, some how the vast majority of HN comments defend the cookie banners saying if you don't do anything "bad" then you don't need the banners.

There are a LOT of shades of gray when it comes to website tracking and HN commenters refuse to deal with nuance.

Imagine running a store, and then I ask you how many customers you had yesterday and what they are looking at. "I don't watch the visitors - it's unnecessary and invasive". When in fact, having a general idea what your customers are looking for or doing in your store is pretty essential for running your business.

Obviously, this is different than taking the customer's picture and trading it with the store across the street.

When it comes to websites and cookie use, the GDPR treated both behaviors identically.

▲

pseudalopex 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Imagine running a store, and then I ask you how many customers you had yesterday and what they are looking at.

Server logs can provide this information.

▲

crazygringo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Only in very simple ways.

Realistically, you want to know things like, how many users who looked at something made a purchase in the next 3 days? Is that going up or down after a recent change we made?

Many necessary business analytics require tracking and aggregating the behavior of individual users. You can't do that with server logs.

	▲	vladms 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Many people want to do many things, problem is do we agree as society it is ok, considering all the implications. I personally find the commercial targeting extremely poor. I look for things to buy and I get stupid ads which don't fit, or I bought the things and still bombarded with the ad for the same thing. But data collection can be used by far more nefarious purposes, like political manipulation (already happening). So yes, I am willing to give up some percentage points in optimizing the commercial and advertisement process (for your example, wait for 2 weeks and check for the actual sales volume difference) to prevent other issues.

▲

legitster 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not for the amount of stuff on the web now that is client-side rendered.

	▲	pseudalopex 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Client side rendering means in practice clicking a product retrieves JSON and images instead of HTML and images. This can be logged.