I honestly don't know how people in Europe surf the web, it's so annoying now. When I was just in Germany, every site I'd have a GDPR popup, then the ads would load, then some random ad would popup with a close button the size of a pixel. This was on major sites. The modern web is so broken, the GDPR popup made it worse. Why can't you just have a browser wide setting to accept or deny GDPR in force. In the US it's bad enough, now with the GDPR popups, it has become almost unusable, especially on mobile.
I don’t understand why the blame is put on GDPR (which is NOT the reason for cookie banners btw, it’s the ePrivacy directive). Websites choose to have cookie banner because they have abusive cookies, tracking, etc. Some websites such as GitHub famously made the choice to remove tracking cookies, and now do not need a cookie banner. Forcing websites to clearly display their crappy practices is a good thing. Forcing websites to ask for user consent before tracking them is good.
The GDPR just missed a step. They should have mandated an automated way for users to present their preference. Like the old DNT flag for instance. With the legal framework behind it that would have made that flag actually useful and browsers would have brought it back quickly.
I assume this didn't happen due to industry lobbying.
AFAIK there was a legislative initiatives to do exactly that and the ad industry whined about it.
I think the result would have been similar to what happened when apple did it's Facebook nerf. Within the margin of error no one wants to be tracked and the ad industry knows this despite their fake "user-benefit" Spiel.
In the end it didn't happen and I can't recall what it was called.
It’s not the same thing. I’d love something like <meta> tags where the websites declare their cookies, with a standardized set of metadata. We could have a browser native permission system like we have for microphone, camera, geolocation, and the possibility to allow or disallow cookies in a unified way. Blocking the undeclared/disallowed cookies would then be done at the browser level, so there would be no need to trust that the websites actually respect the settings
I'd like something like an <ad> tag to go along with it, where the contents are sandboxed by the browser separate from the rest of the page. Mainly as a cudgel against sites which are very anti-adblocker.
> some random ad would popup with a close button the size of a pixel.
Run an adblocker. The Web was a total mess even before GDPR came along and not limited to Europe. If the issue of denying sites a revenue stream bothers you then perhaps make yourself a promise that you'll turn it off when ad networks stop being a vector for malware and/or stop engaging in the un-permitted collection and sale/abuse of personal data.
Personally, I run NoScript (as well as ad blockers) and so cookie popups are relatively rare on my Mac, but I still get them on iOS. I don't like them, but I see them as a warning that the site is going to try to exploit my personal data in return for serving me content.
It's also worth pointing out that there is no actual need to have a cookie banner unless you're doing something with the data that actually needs permission. For instance basecamp.com was GDPR/ePrivacy directive compliant when I was there, but never needed a banner because they decided to stop collecting and processing personal data in a way that required permission.
