It’s about consent, that has nothing to do with good or bad

99.999% of people don't care and don't even know what it's suppose to do. Yet, the cookie prompt has collectively wasted how many millions or billions of hours of people's time? How many freaking times has a website fully loaded, shows you a cookie prompt, and clicking on the wrong option will reload the entire website?

The web has gotten worse since cookie prompts and websites lost a bit of competitiveness to mobile apps because of these annoying prompts. Load a website on a phone screen and 30% of the screen is covered by an intrusive cookie prompt.

As an industry, we learned a long time ago that people hate popups. European Union decided to make a law that causes most websites to show a popup or face potentially bankruptcy level of financial punishment.

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idle_zealot 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Or they could not collect unnecessary user data. They chose to waste users' time. If you don't like that we can always punish them for those billions of wasted hours.

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aurareturn 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Collecting user usage data is the basic step to actually understanding how your users use your website so you can improve it. It's so standard that even the official EU government website collects this kind of data and has a cookie prompt.

And you know what irks me the most? These politicians weren't smart enough to write a law that does this to all digital places. Yes, they only wrote this law for websites while apps are basically free to collect the same data on users freely without any prompting.

	▲	dgellow 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> And you know what irks me the most? These politicians weren't smart enough to write a law that does this to all digital places. Yes, they only wrote this law for websites while apps are basically free to collect the same data on users freely without any prompting. That’s wrong, you can check the EDPB guidelines[0], consent is required for mobile apps, desktop programs, SDKs, etc The collection isn’t the issue. As long as it is done with consent. Which is why the EU website is showing you the banner. You also do not need to prompt if you do not share with 3rd parties and for what is considered essential for your services to function 0: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/our-documents/guid...
	▲	ceejayoz 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Collecting user usage data is the basic step to actually understanding how your users use your website so you can improve it. Sure. To a point! But then you go to, say, the Daily Mail, and its cookie banner tells you they'd like to share with their 1,300 ad/tracking partners, and that you can turn them off only individually.

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dgellow 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, those cookie banners are annoying, I’m not sure what you want me to say. Companies can decide other approaches to track you with your consent, most decided to go with the frustrating UX. Having an annoying banner and explicit tracking consent is still an improvement over just collecting and sharing your data with 3rd parties without your knowledge and consent