> Why would EU governments use cookie banners

They generally don't, because you don't need banners to store cookies that you need to store to have a working site.

In other words, if you see cookie banner, somebody is asking to store/track stuff about you that's not really needed.

Cookie banners were invented by the market as a loophole to continue dark patterns and bad practices. EU is catching flak because its extremely hard to legislate against explicit bad actors abusing loopholes in new technology.

But yeah, blame EU.

And before you go all "but my analytics is needed to get 1% more conversion on my webshop": if you have to convince me to buy your product by making the BUY button 10% larger and pulsate rainbow colors because your A/B test told you so, I will happily include that in the category "dark patterns".

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Neikius 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

you CAN use analytics! Just need to use first party analytics... it is not so hard to set up, there are many opensource self-hosted options.

I hate how everyone and their mother ships all my data to google and others just because they can.

	▲	crazygringo 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Let's not deceive ourselves -- first-party analytics are much, much harder to set up, and a lot less people are trained on other analytics platforms. They're also inherently less trustworthy when it comes to valuations and due diligence, since you could falsify historical data yourself, which you can't do with Google.
	▲	inkysigma an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Can you actually do meaningful analytics without the banner at all? You need to identify the endpoint to deduplicate web page interactions and this isn't covered under essential use afaik. I think this means you need consent though I don't know if this covered under GDPR or ePrivacy or one of the other myriad of regulations on this.

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nonethewiser 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In terms of whether or not the ubiquity of cookie banners is malicious compliance or if it was an inevitable consequence of GDPR, it doesnt matter if trackers are good or necessary. GDPR doesn't ban them. So having them and getting consent is just a normal consequence.

We can say, "Wouldn't it have been nice if the bad UX of all these cookies organically led to the death of trackers," but it didn't. And now proponents of GDPR are blaming companies for following GDPR. This comes from confusing the actual law with a desired side effect that didn't materialize.

	▲	troupo 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, those companies do not follow GDPR. They are testing how far they can go without triggering mass complaints etc. See https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-reject-buttons-come