Banner gets a lot of attention because of the never-ending annoyance it's causing. It's like being surprised that someone would care about something so small as a little rock in their shoe. Yeah, you care about these little things.

It is also definitely true that the regulations are largely written by people who do not understand the tech they're regulating and its potential. Again, not some weird controversial point.

With every next leak where my full name, PESEL (that's like SSN here in Poland), email, phone number become semi-public and... nothing happens, I am becoming more convinced that we are annoying ourselves for nothing. Just degrading our digital lives and generating tons of legal digital text no one reads for no benefit of anyone involved.

At the same time, the very people who pretend to defend my privacy, oppose Tor, Signal, anonymity online, and other tools that definitely benefit me.

> It is also definitely true that the regulations are largely written by people who do not understand the tech

I kind of switched side on this after the silicon valley made it clear that they are in the king making business, and the kings they want are of the fascistic and not benevolent kind. Also, a big aspect of the "tech culture" (beyond the silicon valley itself) has been about focussing on what could be done rather than whether it should, and this "restraint" must come from "outside the tech bubble".

I think GDPR is more good than bad, but the author's example of surveillance capitalism is easily repeated on most EU news sites. Visit bild.de and watch the network inspector light up like a christmas tree. Do you really feel your privacy is being respected?

The 996 partners banner is just the piss take that supposedly makes this legal.

> Banner gets a lot of attention because of the never-ending annoyance it's causing. It's like being surprised that someone would care about something so small as a little rock in their shoe.

No one is surprised that anyone is annoyed by the banners. But it doesn’t make sense to be annoyed at the law¹ instead of the perpetrators. If someone is deliberately putting pebbles in your shoes you should get annoyed at the person doing it, not the pebble.

The GDPR doesn’t require websites to have those banners², nor do they require them to be annoying³. That’s a choice the websites make. Every time you are annoyed at the GDPR because of those banners, you have been manipulated by the website to be mad at the wrong thing.

Imagine restaurants are pissing in their soup. This has become so rampant that a law comes out saying that if you pee in soup, you must warn your customers and give them the option for a pee-free soup. Restaurant then start serving you soup but before letting you eat force you to unwrap hundreds of layers of cellophane. You get so mad at it, “I just want to eat my soup, I don’t care about the pee, what a stupid law”. You should instead be mad that they were pissing in your soup in the first place, and when you see a restaurant doing the cellophane shenanigan you should leave in search of another which doesn’t pee in your soup.

¹ Unless you are annoyed that it is too lenient and think there should’ve been no option at all and that data collection should’ve been outright forbidden, not given a “consent” option that is abused.

² You can choose to not disregard people’s privacy.

³ Quite the contrary, the law requires that rejection be as easy as acceptance.

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The purpose of GDPR was never data protection or privacy. It was designed to legitimise data trade and give corporations legal basis for selling and processing the data where before that it was a grey area. If you look at it through that lens, it will make sense.

Regulators are just a potemkin village thing to make it look like the law is serving ordinary person.

You know GDPR is bad based on what it is