Companies could stop selling and storing your data. They could only use cookies when absolutely essential. They could use lots of kinds of UX.
This is the equivalent of businesses who put a big visible "20% the state says we have to give our employees healthcare" fee on their bill to throw a hissy fit and hope customers get angry at the government for protecting them instead of the business for exploiting them.
As many have said before:
it's basically malicious compliance. They're supposed to be super annoying ... Instead of complying, they choose this obnoxious practice so they could continue ... monitoring every action a visitor does.
You don't need a cookie banner to be allowed to create Cookies. You only need them if you're using them for something like tracking. [1]
Regulators didn't enforce cookie banners. Cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance. When you complain about them, you are doing the lobbying work of ad companies for free. The correct solution is to just not spy on people, and the problem is that the EU didn't go far enough and just ban the behavior altogether. [2]
Cookie pops are malicious compliance to regulations that legitimately protect consumers. You’ve cherry picked one bad side effect to throw out all the ways the EU is way ahead of anyone else in protecting consumers [3]
It's like those warnings in cigarettes packages saying they will kill you. I know cigarettes are bad, but the warnings also make me believe there's at least "some" control in how bad they are. Now if I buy one without the warnings, I will worry those in particular are extra-shady and likely to kill me even faster.
When I see these dialogs listing they have 1289723 gazillion vendors they share data with, I know that whoever is in charge of analytics, privacy or both at the company is incompetent.
The obvious conclusion is that when you try to regulate something like this you arent going to get the behavior you want.
It's trivial to make a site that doesn't need a cookie banner: don't set any cookies. Modern web devs have probably forgotten, but this is actually the default behavior. Cookies don't get set unless you do something to make it happen.
And cookies that you actually need for functionality don't need a banner either. If you're setting a session cookie for logged in users so they stay logged in when navigating between pages, you don't need one.
Why, then, does practically every site in existence now have one? Because they set unnecessary cookies. Because they choose to set unnecessary cookies in order to track you for purposes that are not necessary to the actual functionality of the site.
Every single cookie banner you see is a big sign that says, "We value our ability to track you for marketing purposes more than we value your time."
Apparently they're willing to say that. I still see it as a win. No tracking and no banners would be ideal, but at least the regulation forces them to be honest and up front about what they're doing. I'd rather have tracking and cookie banners announcing it than tracking with zero indication of tracking.
Most small business owner's I've spoken to are keenly aware they are only one bad lawsuit away of closing down. Almost no one care's about the cookie banner. Most just mindlessly click to allow cookies and go on with their life. There's almost no cost to having it.
E.g. "we don't set any tracking cookies, so we're already compliant with the law even without banner, so there's nothing to decline or agree to".
He may be right, sadly. I’ve seen the lack of a cookie banner used to suggest that a site was doing something shady or not complying with the law.
Most people don’t have knowledge about the finer details of cookie laws. They’ve been trained to believe that legitimate sites who comply with the laws will implement the cookie banner, and not seeing it feels suspiciously unprofessional.
Back in the day, this is how we introduced AWS at a large company. We just did it. And once done, they couldn't deny that it cost a fraction of what we were paying our supplier and that things took minutes to set up rather than weeks. And that they worked a lot better.
Yes, there was shouting in meeting rooms. And yes, people said "you can't do this". Turns out they were wrong. A few years later I mentioned this to Werner Vogels. During a meeting. Where my CEO and CTO were present. And where everyone was feeling very good about us being one of AWS' biggest customers in our region.
So when someone says "you can't do that", sometimes you should make them prove it.
(At the time AWS was a good idea. Today dependence on a US service provider is a harder sell in Europe. The _first_ question you get today is if we can host it ourselves if we need to or if we can use a local service provider.)
One of the best indicators that something was not spam was the unsubscribe button.
I have yet to head that cookie prompts are a sign of legitimacy. What business has customers that would think that way?
Although if you've ever worked retail, you'll know that plenty of customers are idiots.
Whatever "Surely no one is that stupid!" assumptions you make will be proven wrong no matter what you do.
So how would you do ePrivacy Directive compliance/risk avoidance in a non-obnoxious way?
Completely eliminates the need for a cookie permission bar.
What's more, if the 'cookie' is entirely local (i.e. it's never sent back to your own server, e.g. you're using the local storage API and the javascript on your page never puts that information into a request), like how this would normally be implemented nowadays, then these requirements don't apply at all (because a cookie according to the law is just something your server gives to the user's device and then the device gives back later).
If you want to remember dark mode with a cookie, then you can just gate that setting behind a “allow functional cookies” toggle.
Getting consent for functional cookies doesn’t have to be done with an intrusive cookie bar on landing. You can request consent as it becomes needed. There’s other ways of complying that aren’t dark patterns.
You are correct that people keep stating such things. But it is incorrect.
That example would be an essential cookie, also known as a strictly necessary cookie.
A shame this FUD is still being spread.
At least for GDPR...
The only ways to actually track without a consent pop-up are:
(1) stay off the device entirely and process server-transmitted data under legitimate interests with a privacy notice, or
(2) confine any device storage to what's strictly necessary for the service the user requested
in fact. you probably don’t need to track users.