I’m a US resident visiting my European home country for Christmas, and I’m astonished at how much worse the web browsing experience is, now that the GDPR is law

I’m a US resident visiting my European home country for Christmas, and I’m astonished at how much worse the web browsing experience is, now that the GDPR is law. The cookie notices of old have turned into full-screen modal dialogs that are deliberately designed to be as obnoxious as possible. These dialogs list hundreds of cookies under multiple tabs and are filled with legalese that any normal person will immediately dismiss. A common trick seems to be to have an “accept all” button that is prominently displayed, but if you want to reject every cookie you have to click onto another tab, click a button to toggle all the switches off, then click “save & exit”. The “save & exit” button is often initially off-screen, and the worst offenders even disable elastic scrolling on mobile to make it as annoying as possible to reach. These shenanigans make private browsing mode particularly intolerable. I hope to see a legal judgement that makes these dark UX patterns explicitly illegal, but I’m not holding out hope. Either way, asking users to decide which third-party companies can set cookies is plain stupid and ripe for abuse. To this lay user, so far this law appears to be a complete disaster for web usability, and business as usual for the big players (Google, Facebook, Quantcast etc). In fact, you could argue that the GDPR concentrates power in the hands of those megacorps. I am a privacy advocate but I think the GDPR is a joke, at least as far as tracking cookies are concerned.