European Union set to revise cookie law, admits cookie banners are annoying::undefined
A major political entity admitting mistake and correcting based on feedback. How refreshing.
The actual EU documents say the complete opposite. They say that the cookie law is going nowhere, this new thing is a framework for easier compliance with the existing law for big business.
From the letter issued by the EU Supervisory Authority to the Commission about this :
While voluntary commitments [of companies to adhere to the GDPR] may be a useful tool, the pledging principles should by no means be used to circumvent legal obligations. In addition, undertaking voluntary commitments does not equate or guarantee compliance with the applicable data protection and privacy framework.
The banners should stay. If a site doesn’t use cookies, you don’t get a banner. The sites choose for themselves if they want to use cookies and put up an obnoxious banner, or not use cookies.
I think enforcing some universal API for this would be a decent compromise. This would allow browsers to handle the UI which means the user can set a global preference or set it per site. At the very least the UI would be uniform so you wouldn’t have to fight dark patterns trying to disable them.
I think what OP is saying that, yes, the cookie abuse should go for sure (I’m actually privvy of the “Legitimate interest” options.)
But that if websites want to track you, then they have to be transparent about it - hence the banners. Wanna track me? Ask me for permission. Is it annoying? Tough luck! Are you losing users because of it? Well, boo-hoo! Remove the tracking and there you go. No banner. Everyone happy.
But the reality is, that is the reality right now. And unless something is done, its not going away
I trust they’ll do a good job focusing on privacy rather than outright going back to “no banner, cookies for everyone!”