11 ms·

Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

332 points by vegasbrianc 2y ago

jp57 2y ago
So like 1hr per person per year?
josefrichter 2y ago
This is probably the biggest fail in the history of the European Union.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  At least the most visible one!
- diggan 2y ago
  If that's true, I'd have to agree that the EU is doing very, very, very well if that is the biggest fail. Unlikely to be true though, for better or worse.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pantalaimon 2y ago
  Nah that’s the tethered bottle caps
  - popcalc 2y ago
    How's that a fail?
teruakohatu 2y ago
I am about as far from Europe as you can get, and I think my fellow kiwis also spent an inordinate about of time clicking EU mandated cookie banners. Cookies should be enforced in the browser. I think all the major browsers block third party cookies now. Bad actors can use other fingerprints to do tracking.
- nicce 2y ago
  > I think all the major browsers block third party cookies now. Bad actors can use other fingerprints to do tracking. One would hope so. Google cancelled the plans https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-scraps-plan-remove-cookies-chrome-2024-07-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-scraps-plan-remove...
- Rygian 2y ago
  "cookie" banners are required for any tracking, not just teaching based specifically on technical cookies. Blocking 3rd party cookies has no impact. Everyone and their cousin can technically track you with first party cookies.
- GJim 2y ago
  You <------> The Point No "cookie banner" is required UNLESS you are using cookies to track me or personally idetify me.... in which case, you must ask my explicit consent to do so. Blame the parasitic adtech industry wanting trade your personal data. Not the EU for providing you with consumer protection.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    > Blame the parasitic adtech industry wanting trade your personal data. Blame them for what? We all understand that personal information is the currency that pays for these services. While we may not love that we have to pay (who does?), we accept it as a fair trade. Until governments get their ass in gear to make paying with more favourable currencies viable, that is going to remain, now just with extra clicks. > Not the EU for providing you with consumer protection. I guess a bandaid is better than nothing, but we'd be better off if the EU would tackle the real issue. Going there would ruffle some real feathers, though, so good luck. But if there is blame to go around, it is on the EU for being too afraid to ruffle them.
    - GJim 2y ago
      > we accept it as a fair trade. For it to be a fair trade, you must fairly ask permission for my personal data! That is the very essence of the GDPR!
diggan 2y ago
Correct URL: https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-banners.html https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-... > This situation calls for an urgent revision of the ePrivacy Directive Shame companies cannot live without tracking cookies, and shame that the blame somehow end up on the regulation, rather than the companies who are the ones who introduce this cookie banner and "massive productivity loss". You know the best way of not having to put up cookie banners on your website? Don't store PII in cookies. You know the best way of not having to care about GDPR? Don't store PII.
- dmafreezone 2y ago
  You know the best way to protect your PII from websites? Don’t use the internet.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > shame that the blame somehow end up on the regulation, rather than the companies who are the ones who introduce this cookie banner and "massive productivity loss" You can wish upon a star that humans weren’t the way we are. In the real world, this was a predictable response to a stupid rule. (And in some cases a necessary one. For example, for websites requiring a login or reliant on ads.) > know the best way of not having to care about GDPR? Don't store PII This is a nothing to hide argument [1]. Proving compliance with GDPR is tedious and expensive even if you’re fully compliant. (Proving no jurisdiction is easier.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
  - diggan 2y ago
    > this was a predictable response to a stupid rule It was predictable that ultimately people would blame the regulation instead of the companies? Not sure I understand what you mean, and even if you meant what I think you meant, not sure what the point is? People blame all sorts of things all the time... Edit since you've added more to your comment > Proving compliance with GDPR is tedious That's my point. No need to prove compliance if GDPR doesn't apply.
coldpie 2y ago
Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banner filters. Fixed. Enable the Annoyances filters too, while you're in there. If you're on iOS, the Kill Sticky bookmarklet does a decent job of cleaning these up without breaking most sites: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/ https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
- tonymet 2y ago
  content-based adblocking requires tremendous resources, and no longer works in Chrome, which is the primary browser.
  - coldpie 2y ago
    So use Firefox.
    - tonymet 2y ago
      tell that to the billion internet users who suffer from cookie banners. I'm talking about the network effect.
      - wtetzner 2y ago
        I'd think anyone capable of installing an adblocker in Chrome would be able to install Firefox + an adblocker. Obviously it would be better if adblocking wasn't required in the first place.
      - coldpie 2y ago
        I do tell them that. I can't help everyone, but I can help some.
  - ravenstine 2y ago
    Those resources are well spent.
gjsman-1000 2y ago
[flagged]
- brookst 2y ago
  The EU regulatory regime is just comedic.
tonymet 2y ago
This destroyed the world wide web, which was the major driver of the internet as a consumer application. I'm referring to the experience of intelligent & creative publishers sharing content openly on the web. This did far more to destroy the world wide web than ads or tracking
- ben_w 2y ago
  Has Facebook ever not been hidden behind a login? Because even if that doesn't count as "intelligent & creative publishers", it certainly set a much harder trend to get around than the banners.
  - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
    > Has Facebook ever not been hidden behind a login? Yes. Not sure when they added the loginwall, but it was relatively recently, compared to my birth.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Hm. Could've sworn it had one back in 2009…
      - whstl 2y ago
        I think you two are talking about different things and are both correct. Facebook indeed had a login page back then, but you could use direct links to read public posts. Today it's roughly the same, but when you go to a direct link it shows a "Login Wall" that pesters you to sign up.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Ads/tracking didn't destroy the web per se - besides the performance impact - but did/do destroy people's privacy.
- pixodaros 2y ago
  If your site has no tracking, it does not need a cookie banner in the EU. AFAIK Wikipedia or Archive of our Own have none.
Seanambers 2y ago
This is the EU in a nutshell. You also have quite a few people defending this. GDPR is basically exactly what Bill Gurley talks about here ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM Regulatory capture.
- lysace 2y ago
  Also quite a few people (mostly from the north) fighting this idiocy. In general: Southern+Central EU wants to build a new USA. Northern states meanwhile want to reduce the power of the EU. A common market is really the only thing we want. UK had enough and quit.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > In general: Southern+Central EU wants to build a new USA. Northern states meanwhile want to reduce the power of the EU. A common market is really the only thing we want. As someone from the north (specifically Sweden) who now lives in the south (specifically Spain), I'm not sure there is majority in either places, either directions, to state this with confidence. Lots of swedes are happy with EU and wants to make it stronger, and lots of Spaniards who had enough of EU and wants it weaker. Maybe it looks differently in the center/eastern parts, haven't spent much time there admittedly.
    - lysace 2y ago
      It's weird that you're fixated on that, but yes, I am Swedish and live in Sweden.
      - dspillett 2y ago
        It's weird that you think it is weird for someone replying to your post to “fixate” on what is most of its relevant content.
Darkskiez 2y ago
https://www.amazingcto.com/cookie-banners-are-not-needed/ https://www.amazingcto.com/cookie-banners-are-not-needed/
- IshKebab 2y ago
  That is dumb. The EU already knew this was the likely outcome because we already had stupid cookie warnings from the previous law. Regulation exists in the real world, not in some fantasy land where companies do what you want.
Y_Y 2y ago
If websites respected Do Not Track then things would be a lot easier. I think we need a right to be listened to. Right now it's enough online to insist on only accepting information in one particular way, like having a noreply email and making people login and submit since shitty web form to respond. Putting your hands over your ears and tape over your mail slot doesn't work in real life, it shouldn't work on the web either.
- chatmasta 2y ago
  I agree with you 100%, but to be ideologically consistent, we should admit that websites have as much of a right to ignore Do Not Track as we have to ignore their tracking scripts.
  - AyyEye 2y ago
    Websites aren't human.
    - chatmasta 2y ago
      Neither are browsers.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > but to be ideologically consistent, we should Not if it comes from "consumer protection", as opposed to "your computer, your rules." Treading down the latter too far leads into weird realms like "Hacking? I didn't make your computer do X, I simply sent it messages, it's your fault for not controlling its behavior."
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    "Rights" are sort of a hollow concept compared to how society ought to function and are just a crappy workaround our society's inability to resolve basic conflict.
patrick0d 2y ago
they could have made the law: >if you collect users data >you must ask first >add a yes or no button on a banner so they can pick but instead the eu citizens were let down by the legislators
- kalaksi 2y ago
  Uhh, what do you think the law is?
- whstl 2y ago
  This is indeed how it should be, and courts have consistently found enforced this. French law for example specifically says that any implementation must "allow the user to refuse the deposit of cookies as easily as to accept it." [1] [1] https://www.termsfeed.com/blog/cookie-consent-decline-reject/ https://www.termsfeed.com/blog/cookie-consent-decline-reject...
- Rygian 2y ago
  That's, in a nutshell, what the law says since 2018. Whatever you see in cookie banners is either malicious compliance or directly illegal (and already being prosecuted and resulting in fines).
- immibis 2y ago
  that IS the law
taosx 2y ago
The internet is broken and I don't think it's only in the EU. In the last years I found myself just avoiding using websites I'm not familiar with or confident they're not filled with ads and trackers, I've set-up some aggregators and custom readers to find and get the information I'm interested in. If I open a page that has the cookie banner that blocks me from reading the content or forces me to agree I just close it, it wouldn't have been that important anyway.
frereubu 2y ago
"All" the EU needs to do is to mandate adherence to the Do Not Track setting in browsers, but then vast swathes of businesses based on unwanted and unethical tracking would go bust, so we have this really shitty stalemate. All websites we build adhere to the Do Not Track setting and don't even show a cookie banner if it's set. The only question is whether we should show a message to say that we're not tracking people because we see they've asked us not to! It's possibly a bit easier for us because we work primarily in the non-profit sector where ethics are perhaps a little higher up the agenda.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > but then vast swathes of businesses based on unwanted and unethical tracking would go bust, so we have this really shitty stalemate They’d be supplanted by foreign competitors. That’s the actual stalemate.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > They’d be supplanted by foreign competitors. That’s the actual stalemate. Most of the ad trackers I'm aware of are already foreign to the EU, so that doesn't seem to be even an economic threat from the EU's perspective.
- ravenstine 2y ago
  Let those fuckers go out of business. I'm sorry, but if we are really so worried about businesses failing that we can't restore some amount of sanity, then something is wrong with society.
keketi 2y ago
Because I use fresh incognito mode for each browsing session, I have to click through those consent popups on every website I visit. Quite frustrating to say the least.
- evanb 2y ago
  You can use Consentomatic to have it automatically handled. It's from Aarhus University, open source. https://consentomatic.au.dk/ https://consentomatic.au.dk/
  - nicce 2y ago
    uBlock's cookie filters might be even more effective if you don't care to fine tune.
sharunkumarks 2y ago
Link is dead now?
guywithahat 2y ago
The whole thing is a colossal waste too, it was a law written by people who don't understand tech for special interest groups who don't want to actually make things better. If you don't want a website doing something on your computer, you start with the browser, not the website.
- tchalla 2y ago
  Future headlines after a browser compliance law made - “EU is destroying innovation!”
  - guywithahat 2y ago
    You shouldn't need any kind of law here. Consumers have 100% of the power as it stands in regards to browser tracking. The innovation should be in browsers and plugins, not donottrack flags or compliance laws.
- throwaway346434 2y ago
  Enforced by companies who are doing shady things with data in the most inconvenient way, rather than listening to DoNotTrack or https://globalprivacycontrol.org/ https://globalprivacycontrol.org/ Because if they can say "hey look over there, regulation bad"; they can escape regulation if it is repealed
- RejectedChin 2y ago
  That's why they created DoNotTrack initially. Then browsers turned that on by default, ad revenue lowered, and sites/adcompanies decided to ignore it because it was turned on by default.
  - wtetzner 2y ago
    Maybe the legislation simply should have required DoNotTrack to be honored.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    1. Do not track was not the browser deciding what to do (that would be a similar shape as Firefox multi-account containers and incognito mode). It was a machine-readable way to tell the site what to do; ie the same incorrect model as the click-through banners we have now, just non-interactive. 2. It was intended to be a way to communicate an actual intent from the user. Once it was set by default, it ceased to be an indicator of user intent.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ryandrake 2y ago
People blame the cookie banners themselves or the legislation that "made them necessary" but somehow never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites that make them subject to the law. The "cookie banner problem" exists because it's primarily end users that are shouldering the burden of them, and not the companies. For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software engineer to code up a banner. For everyone else, it's thousands of wasted seconds per year. Make the law hit companies where it hurts: their balance sheets.
- legitster 2y ago
  > never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites Part of the problem is that the law didn't seek to distinguish between tame first-party cookies and the really naughty third-party cookies so the burden is equal regardless of how malicious the service is. > For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software engineer to code up a banner. This is actually not true. There's a lot more that goes into a cookie banner than you might realize, and there's now an industry dominated by a small handful of players (Osano vs OneTrust)
  - Rygian 2y ago
    The cookie banner has nothing to do with first -party vs third-party. The cookie banner is required depending on the purpose of the cookies, not the party setting them.
  - nicce 2y ago
    > There's a lot more that goes into a cookie banner than you might realize, and there's now an industry dominated by a small handful of players (Osano vs OneTrust) Isn't this industry for those, who want to share their website data automatically with 100+ partners? For others, who don't really share that much data with others, less relevant.
    - legitster 2y ago
      If you are just running a static websites, maybe. But if you are going to run a website with any services on it (video content, eCommerce, member management, etc) you are going to have partners. Establishing a browser session with every single one would be pretty onerous (and honestly much worse for privacy) so a first-party cookie is a pretty good compromise.
legitster 2y ago
This is an example of the potential double-edged sword of passing legislation without input from lobbyists. On one hand, without an industry voice, they passed an amazingly ambitious set of protections. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like there was a technical industry expert who warned them of the implications. (I say that, but the EU bureaucrats that passed this law may actually see the immense numbers of popups as a win still - who knows). A revision is patently obvious to seemingly everyone - revise the law to instead mandate that websites respect the Do Not Track header, or at least have designed a more granular replacement. There's no reason you shouldn't just be able to set it once and your browser tracks it for you.
kalaksi 2y ago
Unfortunately, even without consent banners, there's plenty of unnecessary clicking in this new golden age of (CSS) popups.
elashri 2y ago
I would like to present my opinion that this amount of time is spent dealing with website malicious compliance with EU rules. And it is in general asking people to get tracked and present them with personalized track or share/sell the data to their partners. All of these does not happen and you don't have to do that if you don't track and collect information about your users. Well there are some genuine websites that needs that but I am talking about the general case.
sccomps 2y ago
A lot of those hours might be saved if they mandate a “reject all cookies” button on the cookie banner.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  They do already, and big companies have already been fined for not offering them, which led to some smaller parties adding them. See here [0] for a list, amongst which was Microsoft getting a $65 million fine for not having an easy opt-out on Bing, or $162 million to Google for the same thing. Noncompliance should be reported. [0] https://www.cookieyes.com/blog/cookie-consent-fines/ https://www.cookieyes.com/blog/cookie-consent-fines/
  - what 2y ago
    Everyone should just geo block EU visitors instead.
    - taosx 2y ago
      I know a lot of people that wouldn't mind that. 1. There are ways to bypass geo-block. 2. People would build alternatives specifically for EU (with few exceptions). 3. They could even offer those alternatives to US, but with better privacy out of the box.
      - marcosdumay 2y ago
        On #1, yeah, you can. But don't expect the site to respect the EU laws. I'm all for the hostile corporation to hostilize themselves into complete inaccessibility too. Let them build their castle, with a moat, and not let anyone near them. But unfortunately, they are still smarter than that. (But anyway, they seem to be getting dumber by the minute, so there's still hope.)
    - Sakos 2y ago
      Yeah, fuck everybody else's privacy. /s Why are you like this?
_qua 2y ago
I don't even have the words to express how little I care if companies serve me targeted ads with cookies. On the other hand I absolutely despise what the average visit to website with a cookie banner has become.
- dspillett 2y ago
  Blame the companies, not the regulations. A significant part of their reasoning behind byzantine stalking permissions banners is that they are deliberately inconveniencing people like you who don't care, so you can be weaponised against those of us who do in discussions about the regulations and related privacy matters.
osm3000 2y ago
I can't believe any of this made a difference in privacy. There is ZERO chance that the law can be enforced here. I've worked in few startups in Europe, no one understand their obligation, let alone the consequences from third party services. This whole cookie banners, and GDPR in general, is as good as literature.
edm0nd 2y ago
rip >404 Not Found
alpaca128 2y ago
Correct headline: User-hostile websites waste 575M hours of Europeans' time every year.
Vagantem 2y ago
Can recommend consent-o-matic Chrome extension which automatically selects "no" to everything! https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdjildafknihdffpkfmmpnpoiajfjnjd https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdj...
edm0nd 2y ago
new URL https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-banners.html https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-...
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> actively tracking a user beyond their visit to a website is difficult or borderline impossible for website owners, as it would require a court order. I am skeptical of this claim. Partially due to the existence of trackers, beacons, 3rd party cookies and fingerprinting methods. > Identifying users typically requires a court order to process IP addresses And this one as well.
air7 2y ago
I know that I'm in the minority, especially here, but I generally welcome paying with my data. it seems to me that companies need to generate revenue and they do this by extracting something of value from the user and that this thing by definition almost would be something the user isn't happy to just hand over: money, watching ads, electricity for mining crypto, personal data etc. It's some form of payment. for me personally out of all these options giving my data is my least painful payment option for one off services.
- immibis 2y ago
  Then click the consent button. You have to consent to a payment being extracted from you.
ayaros 2y ago
Why should websites even be trusted with implementing these banners in the first place? Browser vendors should be responsible for implementing these controls per-origin. Give a little banner pop-up built into Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and the rest. Have it display every time a new site sets a cookie for the first time. Or have it reject every cookie by default, unless I whitelist a site. This would result in a consistent user-experience across the board, and I'd actually be able to trust that I'm not being tracked. Instead, we are trusting the very websites we are blaming on tracking us in the most decietful, malicious ways possible to self-regulate and implement these controls. So now every website gets a shitty banner - on top of all the other annoying in-page banners and popups which are a staple of 2020s web design - that asks us if we want cookies. All these banners look different, are positioned differently on the page, appear at different times after the page is loaded, and function differently. So there's no consistency. And 90% of the time you can't disable all the cookies anyway, because there's that little grayed out toggle control for "strictly necessary cookies." How do I know one of those cookies you consider "strictly-necessary" or "crucial for site functionality" doesn't connect back to some evil tracking algorithm, the blocking of which was the whole point of this banner debacle in the first place? So we have essentially asked websites to self-regulate the way the US's vitamin/supplement industury does, except its worse because I don't have to click a fucking banner before I take a capsule of what may or may not be vitamin C. So again, why isn't this the responsibility of browser vendors? Am I taking crazy pills? Am I going insane or is the world going insane? /rant
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >Am I going insane or is the world going insane? You haven't been reading the news lately, have you?
  - self_awareness 2y ago
    > You haven't been reading the news lately, have you? If you're referring to the US elections, then you might be interested in the fact that not everyone on HN is from US, and not everyone cares.
compootr 2y ago
404ing for me... did this site get hugged to death?
aristofun 2y ago
That what always happens when you give too much power to government - stupid people making stupid ineffective decisions.
jacknews 2y ago
These calculations read like an episode of Silicon Valley. Sure the banners are a stupid idea and a little annoying, but these figures have no merit. There's no way 500m hours of productivity are going to materialize from removing the banners. Removing 'please subscribe' popups, and other ads, now that's altogether different...
amadeuspagel 2y ago
There's a more insidious effect of cookie banners, which is that they make it annoying to follow external links, especially to websites that you haven't visited before. This disadvantages websites built for external links, like HN.
sottol 2y ago
Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by Youtube ads in <world>. <S>OMFG!!! YOUTUBE IS COSTING THE WORLD *750B EUR* PER YEAR. </S> How many hours of productivity are lost to Youtube ads? 2.49 billion active users, average seems to be 29 hours per month, reddit reports 4 ads/10 minutes lately - so 24 ads/hour, 5 seconds each (even though that went up!), so 2mins of ads/hour or 1 hour of ads per month, 12 hours of ads per year! 12 hours * 25 Eur/hour * 2.5B = 750B Eur (probably made some mistakes) Also, this article is ridiculous - like assuming all 400M European internet users are "productive" at 25Eur/h (30% are probably < 15 or > 65), people clicking 1200 banners per year because they visit 100 sites/month (12*100, right?!) and so on.
m3kw9 2y ago
There is cookie banners in the US and canada
kylecazar 2y ago
the angle of wasted productivity on the end-user's side seems ridiculous. If anything, count wasted resources in implementation for little gain for the end-user. "Assuming it takes an average of 5 seconds per interaction with a cookie banner". People don't spend 5 seconds clicking accept. They start reading their website, notice the banner in their periphery shortly after, and click it to go away.
- self_awareness 2y ago
  I hope you're joking. The banner often obscures the view, and the user need to dismiss it in order to know if the page contains the information user looks for. But in order to dismiss it, you can click "Accept all" easily and job done, OR you need to enter options by clicking the "manage" button, find your way around the banner, understand what are the options and which ones are checked and which are unchecked, then click "consent" or whatever terminology is used, but only after finding the button. This easily can take up to a minute. Yes, sometimes there's the "reject all" button, but not always. Also you need to know how they define the "reject all" button, because sometimes it probably may be defined as "reject some". It's not a problem for me, because I autoclick them away with browser plugins, but when I'm on a mobile, the web is really hard to browse because of those banners.
class4behavior 2y ago
Misleading headline: It's productivity loss caused by non-essential data collection. The EU does not mandate banners, it's the businesses choosing to bully their customers into accepting all tracking and profiling.
- GJim 2y ago
  Is the right answer. It's stunning the number of people on HN (a tech news site!) who don't realise there is simply no requirement for "cookie banners" UNLESS you are using those cookies to track me or personally identify me (advertisers take a bow)..... In which case you need to ask my explicit permission to do so. And so you should.
pixodaros 2y ago
Now count how much money and time is wasted loading all the spyware of typical commercial websites to generate a tiny value from selling ads and personally identifying information (the mobile data costs alone ...)
semiinfinitely 2y ago
The previous headline was better
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
My opinion is that cookie banners are so bad because of GDPR and not getting rid of the cookie law when GDPR was enacted. Then everybody kept their cookie banners around and folded GDPR requirements into it, making it more complex, and more necessary all over the place, and less likely for people to think do we need these cookies or not and do we need to show this banner because of fear of GDPR (potential fines are big!!)
foxglacier 2y ago
Around the time this started, Google was going to penalize sites in its search ranking if they greeted users with an obtrusive popup. I thought that would strongly discourage cookie banners but then suddenly there was an explosion of stupid popups everywhere - newsletter signups, cookie banners, "special offers", overlaid ads, etc. I guess Google never did that thing?
littlestymaar 2y ago
“Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by companies implementing dark patterns in order to extort used consent” FTFY And you could add an analysis of the productivity cost of those “Subscribe to out newsletter” and “The experience is better on the app” pop-ups please?
d--b 2y ago
This doesn’t take into account the fact that some people just close the website, saving countless minutes of rabbit hole browsing… Oh and 5 seconds is unrealistically high.
snehk 2y ago
The whole law should have been forcing sites to not ignore DoNotTrack bworser settings. It's a prime example of the EU being utterly useless because they don't understand the underlying issue and then choose a "solution" that's as much in your face as possible but doesn't change anything about the original problem. It's the whole plastic straw thing in digital form.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  This, exactly. And possibly requiring browser vendors to implement Do Not Track in an accessible and user-friendly way. (Those whose business models are reliant on ads might need a firm nudge there.)
- cenamus 2y ago
  If only those websites just didn't use cookies when 99% of them don't need them. Easy to display the cookie terror banner and blame the EU while you're using it for "analytics". And the majority isn't even compliant, without a big disable button, instead hiding it through 10 different dark patterns in the cookie setting, where every misclick leads to accepting the whole array of spyware.
- jajko 2y ago
  Its lazy engineering. Most sites dont need such functionality, but devs are either incompetent to rip it out of libraries they use, are stuck in web design patterns from 20 years ago themselves or its a simple business decision to trade user data. When was the last time you really needed cookies for your business and couldnt get around it with (usually better) tech? Dont blame the system (nonideal but darn good to be in place, compared to literally rest of the world where humans have simply less rights), when its companies failing knowingly basic rules.
- mpeg 2y ago
  I don't think DNT settings were not considered – they were probably discarded as they hurt user privacy. Fingerprinting tools use the DNT setting as an extra flag to identify the user, so having it set to a non-default means you actually get tracked more, not less.
Animats 2y ago
Exemptions from cookie banners for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) using analytics, tracking user interactions on their websites, and managing basic advertising are imperative to mitigate unnecessary economic and productivity losses. Yeah, right. You don't have to use cookie banners if you don't use cookies. Unless you are running ads or profiling users, you can get equivalent data from server logs.
pmg101 2y ago
Am I literally the only person who this doesn't bother? When I go to a site I click all the xs and buttons until I can see content, without any conscious engagement at all really. Sometimes when you go for a walk in the country there are stiles or gates to climb over and that is also fine. I feel like there's some kind of implied belief here that all interactions with the world should be perfectly frictionless which I think may be more of a niche view than is realised?
- sureglymop 2y ago
  No. Same here and I agree with you. I think websites having to disclose what third party cookies they save is worth the small inconvenience. And if they maliciously comply, that hopefully leads to further regulations.
uniqueuid 2y ago
I am kind of frustrated by the widespread misunderstandings in this thread. Laws are best when they are abstract, so that there is no need for frequent updates and they adapt to changing realities. The European "cookie law" does not mandate cookie banners, it mandates informed consent. Companies choose to implement that as a banner. There is no doubt that the goals set by the law are sensible. It is also not evident that losing time over privacy is so horrible. In fact, when designing a law that enhances consumer rights through informed consent, it is inevitable that this imposes additional time spent on thinking, considering and acting. It's the whole point, folks! You cannot have an informed case-by-case decision without spending time.
- mpeg 2y ago
  What I find funny about the whole thing is that the grand majority of companies with cookie banners are not implementing them correctly, and therefore are still in breach of the law. I see constantly banners on sites that set tracking cookies by default, and delete them if you reject them in the banner (or even worse, not delete them at all!) – this is not compliant as the cookies were set before consent was given Also see banners where there is only a big "OK" button, with no visible option to reject, this is also not compliant!
  - weinzierl 2y ago
    One way to see it is that it's their way of passive-aggressive protest against a law they don't want. Maybe the aim was never to abide by the law, just to pretend and annoy people enough to draw them on your side.
    - dominicrose 2y ago
      A clear example of passive-aggressive protest was from Google, the removal of links to Google maps from the search results. Instead of providing a choice of multiple map providers, they just completely removed the links. To clarify: I'm in Europe (France).
      - 2y ago
yakcyll 2y ago
The title originally claimed 575M hours spent every year by Europeans on cookie banners. That's 12 seconds on average a day per person. Hardly anything to complain about.
- oasisaimlessly 2y ago
  An alternative interpretation: "575M hours spent every year by Europeans" = 850 average human lifespans per year Cookie banners in Europe have an effect vaguely comparable to "wasting" 850 human lives per year.
  - kalaksi 2y ago
    You can use similar big scary numbers and words for a lot of much worse and more time consuming things.
ChoHag 2y ago
[dead]
indulona 2y ago
we have fought 20 years to get rid of popups, then EU comes in and shits all over the internet.
- dspillett 2y ago
  Nope. Companies, especially ad-tech and other stalkers and the sites/apps who use their services, are doing the shitting. Nothing in the relevant regulations, from the EU, California, or anywhere else, in any way mandates the inconvenience that these companies are creating for you.
  - indulona 2y ago
    well, technically you are correct, since the consent is required only for non-essential cookies. which means third party / tracking cookies.
Gys 2y ago
The numbers are much lower I think, at least nowadays. > On average, a user visits about 100 websites per month, totaling 1,200 websites per year. The number of 100 websites per month is pulled out of thin air. Following the links it seems to be based on the number of web PAGES visited DAILY by Americans in 2007. In my anecdata most people are online a lot but mostly in just a few apps and websites. So I guess all numbers in the article should be much much lower.
sensanaty 2y ago
And how much time is wasted clicking away mailing list banners, popup ads, trying to parse the real download button on a page, watching through unskippable video ads, trying to decipher which part of a website is the article vs an ad etc?
devilmoon 2y ago
So, about 1 and a half hours per European every year? That's pretty good to avoid gifting my data to adtech shitheads
cameldrv 2y ago
Think about this: Cookie banners are only a small part of how bad UI wastes people's time. Computers could be so much more useful if more care was put into UI for widely used applications and OSes.
bogeholm 2y ago
It’s interesting to consider the opportunity cost of these 1.42 hours/year, which the study completely misses. What would I have contributed to my GDP in the 5 seconds it took to ‘Reject all’ on Reddit?
satokausi 2y ago
This calculation somehow assumes that clicking banners on your free time equals lost money in terms of production. If the average time for toilet visits per day is 12 minutes, we are losing 89.8 million hours a day collectively across Europe, and continuing the same logic in as in the article, with 25€/h this sums to 5% of EU GDP being spent down the drain. Maybe we should focus efforts on a productivity programme to ban bathroom visits?
- elric 2y ago
  That's very much apples and oranges. One is a biological necessity, while the other is a consequence of surveillance capitalism.
- hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
  There are a few assumptions there that make me scratch my head 1. the general 'utility' of informing users about cookies (or giving them the opportunity) and getting 'consent' is completely ignored. 2. The time spent is assumed to be 'working' productive time, not leisure time 3. They ignore the existence of tools that automate these (auto accept/reject) At this point, why not calculate the 'economic costs' of every activity we do outside of work? I imagine reading and watching TV and movies would have massive productivity hits...
ordu 2y ago
I'm not sure I can accept their calculations. For example, I use "I do not care about cookies" + "Cookie AutoDelete". The first one claims it accepts only necessary cookies, closing or hiding all banners, while the second deletes all cookies when I leave the site. I spend ~0sec on these banners. How many are there people like me? The authors say nothing about this solution and it seems to me that they are not aware of the possibility of the automation. They just assume that each banner costs 5 seconds. Why 5 seconds? It is an eternity, to pick "reject" and click on it would take 0.5 seconds or so, wouldn't it? Yeah, I know, there are sites that do not allow just reject all and force you to uncheck a several dozen of checkboxes one by one, but these sites eat much more time than 5 seconds, it is more like 50 seconds. Maybe 5 seconds is an average value across all sites? But how it was calculated? But I agree, that the situation is stupid. It would be better to have a standard API common for all sites, that will allow addons to accept and reject cookies based on the user settings.
illiac786 2y ago
To the companies out there with shitty cookie banners: just stop tracking. No more banner, no annoyed users, better engagement of your end users.
diffeomorphism 2y ago
Short reality check. Browsers support default "no" since forever. The websites just refuse to accept it and insist on wasting your time out of spite. So modest proposal: Make these websites pay 575€ million/year for wasting citizens' time or have them accept that "no" means "no".
ApolloFortyNine 2y ago
Lots of people here saying the banners are simply unnecessary, but with untargeted advertising paying over 90% less, it simply is necessary for any website with ads. If you got told tomorrow you had to start every conversation with "are you okay if I remember this" or you lose 90% of your salary, guess what you'd do.
atoav 2y ago
It is literally that meme where the guy pushes a stick into the spokes of his own bicycle only to blame others. You don't need to ask people for their consent if you do not store personal data client side to track them. There are clear definitions what is personal and what isn't, you can store cookies for legitimate reasons which are also clearly outlined. So if you don't want to ask for consent, you can avoid that by not doing things that require it.
tim333 2y ago
I wonder if anyone surveyed Europeans to see if they want the things? I get them in the UK and would be happier without them myself.
spygarapna2001 2y ago
[dead]

332 points by vegasbrianc 2y ago

jp57 2y ago

So like 1hr per person per year?

josefrichter 2y ago

This is probably the biggest fail in the history of the European Union.

dr_dshiv 2y ago
At least the most visible one!
diggan 2y ago
If that's true, I'd have to agree that the EU is doing very, very, very well if that is the biggest fail. Unlikely to be true though, for better or worse.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pantalaimon 2y ago
Nah that’s the tethered bottle caps
- popcalc 2y ago
  How's that a fail?

teruakohatu 2y ago

I am about as far from Europe as you can get, and I think my fellow kiwis also spent an inordinate about of time clicking EU mandated cookie banners. Cookies should be enforced in the browser. I think all the major browsers block third party cookies now. Bad actors can use other fingerprints to do tracking.

nicce 2y ago
> I think all the major browsers block third party cookies now. Bad actors can use other fingerprints to do tracking. One would hope so. Google cancelled the plans https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-scraps-plan-remove-cookies-chrome-2024-07-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-scraps-plan-remove...
Rygian 2y ago
"cookie" banners are required for any tracking, not just teaching based specifically on technical cookies. Blocking 3rd party cookies has no impact. Everyone and their cousin can technically track you with first party cookies.
GJim 2y ago
You <------> The Point No "cookie banner" is required UNLESS you are using cookies to track me or personally idetify me.... in which case, you must ask my explicit consent to do so. Blame the parasitic adtech industry wanting trade your personal data. Not the EU for providing you with consumer protection.
- randomdata 2y ago
  > Blame the parasitic adtech industry wanting trade your personal data. Blame them for what? We all understand that personal information is the currency that pays for these services. While we may not love that we have to pay (who does?), we accept it as a fair trade. Until governments get their ass in gear to make paying with more favourable currencies viable, that is going to remain, now just with extra clicks. > Not the EU for providing you with consumer protection. I guess a bandaid is better than nothing, but we'd be better off if the EU would tackle the real issue. Going there would ruffle some real feathers, though, so good luck. But if there is blame to go around, it is on the EU for being too afraid to ruffle them.
  - GJim 2y ago
    > we accept it as a fair trade. For it to be a fair trade, you must fairly ask permission for my personal data! That is the very essence of the GDPR!

diggan 2y ago

Correct URL: https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-banners.html https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-... > This situation calls for an urgent revision of the ePrivacy Directive Shame companies cannot live without tracking cookies, and shame that the blame somehow end up on the regulation, rather than the companies who are the ones who introduce this cookie banner and "massive productivity loss". You know the best way of not having to put up cookie banners on your website? Don't store PII in cookies. You know the best way of not having to care about GDPR? Don't store PII.

dmafreezone 2y ago
You know the best way to protect your PII from websites? Don’t use the internet.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> shame that the blame somehow end up on the regulation, rather than the companies who are the ones who introduce this cookie banner and "massive productivity loss" You can wish upon a star that humans weren’t the way we are. In the real world, this was a predictable response to a stupid rule. (And in some cases a necessary one. For example, for websites requiring a login or reliant on ads.) > know the best way of not having to care about GDPR? Don't store PII This is a nothing to hide argument [1]. Proving compliance with GDPR is tedious and expensive even if you’re fully compliant. (Proving no jurisdiction is easier.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
- diggan 2y ago
  > this was a predictable response to a stupid rule It was predictable that ultimately people would blame the regulation instead of the companies? Not sure I understand what you mean, and even if you meant what I think you meant, not sure what the point is? People blame all sorts of things all the time... Edit since you've added more to your comment > Proving compliance with GDPR is tedious That's my point. No need to prove compliance if GDPR doesn't apply.

coldpie 2y ago

Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banner filters. Fixed. Enable the Annoyances filters too, while you're in there. If you're on iOS, the Kill Sticky bookmarklet does a decent job of cleaning these up without breaking most sites: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/ https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...

tonymet 2y ago
content-based adblocking requires tremendous resources, and no longer works in Chrome, which is the primary browser.
- coldpie 2y ago
  So use Firefox.
  - tonymet 2y ago
    tell that to the billion internet users who suffer from cookie banners. I'm talking about the network effect.
    - wtetzner 2y ago
      I'd think anyone capable of installing an adblocker in Chrome would be able to install Firefox + an adblocker. Obviously it would be better if adblocking wasn't required in the first place.
    - coldpie 2y ago
      I do tell them that. I can't help everyone, but I can help some.
- ravenstine 2y ago
  Those resources are well spent.

gjsman-1000 2y ago

[flagged]

brookst 2y ago
The EU regulatory regime is just comedic.

tonymet 2y ago

This destroyed the world wide web, which was the major driver of the internet as a consumer application. I'm referring to the experience of intelligent & creative publishers sharing content openly on the web. This did far more to destroy the world wide web than ads or tracking

ben_w 2y ago
Has Facebook ever not been hidden behind a login? Because even if that doesn't count as "intelligent & creative publishers", it certainly set a much harder trend to get around than the banners.
- ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
  > Has Facebook ever not been hidden behind a login? Yes. Not sure when they added the loginwall, but it was relatively recently, compared to my birth.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Hm. Could've sworn it had one back in 2009…
    - whstl 2y ago
      I think you two are talking about different things and are both correct. Facebook indeed had a login page back then, but you could use direct links to read public posts. Today it's roughly the same, but when you go to a direct link it shows a "Login Wall" that pesters you to sign up.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Ads/tracking didn't destroy the web per se - besides the performance impact - but did/do destroy people's privacy.
pixodaros 2y ago
If your site has no tracking, it does not need a cookie banner in the EU. AFAIK Wikipedia or Archive of our Own have none.

Seanambers 2y ago

This is the EU in a nutshell. You also have quite a few people defending this. GDPR is basically exactly what Bill Gurley talks about here ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM Regulatory capture.

lysace 2y ago
Also quite a few people (mostly from the north) fighting this idiocy. In general: Southern+Central EU wants to build a new USA. Northern states meanwhile want to reduce the power of the EU. A common market is really the only thing we want. UK had enough and quit.
- diggan 2y ago
  > In general: Southern+Central EU wants to build a new USA. Northern states meanwhile want to reduce the power of the EU. A common market is really the only thing we want. As someone from the north (specifically Sweden) who now lives in the south (specifically Spain), I'm not sure there is majority in either places, either directions, to state this with confidence. Lots of swedes are happy with EU and wants to make it stronger, and lots of Spaniards who had enough of EU and wants it weaker. Maybe it looks differently in the center/eastern parts, haven't spent much time there admittedly.
  - lysace 2y ago
    It's weird that you're fixated on that, but yes, I am Swedish and live in Sweden.
    - dspillett 2y ago
      It's weird that you think it is weird for someone replying to your post to “fixate” on what is most of its relevant content.

Darkskiez 2y ago

https://www.amazingcto.com/cookie-banners-are-not-needed/ https://www.amazingcto.com/cookie-banners-are-not-needed/

IshKebab 2y ago
That is dumb. The EU already knew this was the likely outcome because we already had stupid cookie warnings from the previous law. Regulation exists in the real world, not in some fantasy land where companies do what you want.

Y_Y 2y ago

If websites respected Do Not Track then things would be a lot easier. I think we need a right to be listened to. Right now it's enough online to insist on only accepting information in one particular way, like having a noreply email and making people login and submit since shitty web form to respond. Putting your hands over your ears and tape over your mail slot doesn't work in real life, it shouldn't work on the web either.

chatmasta 2y ago
I agree with you 100%, but to be ideologically consistent, we should admit that websites have as much of a right to ignore Do Not Track as we have to ignore their tracking scripts.
- AyyEye 2y ago
  Websites aren't human.
  - chatmasta 2y ago
    Neither are browsers.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > but to be ideologically consistent, we should Not if it comes from "consumer protection", as opposed to "your computer, your rules." Treading down the latter too far leads into weird realms like "Hacking? I didn't make your computer do X, I simply sent it messages, it's your fault for not controlling its behavior."
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  "Rights" are sort of a hollow concept compared to how society ought to function and are just a crappy workaround our society's inability to resolve basic conflict.

patrick0d 2y ago

they could have made the law: >if you collect users data >you must ask first >add a yes or no button on a banner so they can pick but instead the eu citizens were let down by the legislators

kalaksi 2y ago
Uhh, what do you think the law is?
whstl 2y ago
This is indeed how it should be, and courts have consistently found enforced this. French law for example specifically says that any implementation must "allow the user to refuse the deposit of cookies as easily as to accept it." [1] [1] https://www.termsfeed.com/blog/cookie-consent-decline-reject/ https://www.termsfeed.com/blog/cookie-consent-decline-reject...
Rygian 2y ago
That's, in a nutshell, what the law says since 2018. Whatever you see in cookie banners is either malicious compliance or directly illegal (and already being prosecuted and resulting in fines).
immibis 2y ago
that IS the law

taosx 2y ago

The internet is broken and I don't think it's only in the EU. In the last years I found myself just avoiding using websites I'm not familiar with or confident they're not filled with ads and trackers, I've set-up some aggregators and custom readers to find and get the information I'm interested in. If I open a page that has the cookie banner that blocks me from reading the content or forces me to agree I just close it, it wouldn't have been that important anyway.

frereubu 2y ago

"All" the EU needs to do is to mandate adherence to the Do Not Track setting in browsers, but then vast swathes of businesses based on unwanted and unethical tracking would go bust, so we have this really shitty stalemate. All websites we build adhere to the Do Not Track setting and don't even show a cookie banner if it's set. The only question is whether we should show a message to say that we're not tracking people because we see they've asked us not to! It's possibly a bit easier for us because we work primarily in the non-profit sector where ethics are perhaps a little higher up the agenda.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> but then vast swathes of businesses based on unwanted and unethical tracking would go bust, so we have this really shitty stalemate They’d be supplanted by foreign competitors. That’s the actual stalemate.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > They’d be supplanted by foreign competitors. That’s the actual stalemate. Most of the ad trackers I'm aware of are already foreign to the EU, so that doesn't seem to be even an economic threat from the EU's perspective.
ravenstine 2y ago
Let those fuckers go out of business. I'm sorry, but if we are really so worried about businesses failing that we can't restore some amount of sanity, then something is wrong with society.

keketi 2y ago

Because I use fresh incognito mode for each browsing session, I have to click through those consent popups on every website I visit. Quite frustrating to say the least.

evanb 2y ago
You can use Consentomatic to have it automatically handled. It's from Aarhus University, open source. https://consentomatic.au.dk/ https://consentomatic.au.dk/
- nicce 2y ago
  uBlock's cookie filters might be even more effective if you don't care to fine tune.

sharunkumarks 2y ago

Link is dead now?

guywithahat 2y ago

The whole thing is a colossal waste too, it was a law written by people who don't understand tech for special interest groups who don't want to actually make things better. If you don't want a website doing something on your computer, you start with the browser, not the website.

tchalla 2y ago
Future headlines after a browser compliance law made - “EU is destroying innovation!”
- guywithahat 2y ago
  You shouldn't need any kind of law here. Consumers have 100% of the power as it stands in regards to browser tracking. The innovation should be in browsers and plugins, not donottrack flags or compliance laws.
throwaway346434 2y ago
Enforced by companies who are doing shady things with data in the most inconvenient way, rather than listening to DoNotTrack or https://globalprivacycontrol.org/ https://globalprivacycontrol.org/ Because if they can say "hey look over there, regulation bad"; they can escape regulation if it is repealed
RejectedChin 2y ago
That's why they created DoNotTrack initially. Then browsers turned that on by default, ad revenue lowered, and sites/adcompanies decided to ignore it because it was turned on by default.
- wtetzner 2y ago
  Maybe the legislation simply should have required DoNotTrack to be honored.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  1. Do not track was not the browser deciding what to do (that would be a similar shape as Firefox multi-account containers and incognito mode). It was a machine-readable way to tell the site what to do; ie the same incorrect model as the click-through banners we have now, just non-interactive. 2. It was intended to be a way to communicate an actual intent from the user. Once it was set by default, it ceased to be an indicator of user intent.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ryandrake 2y ago

People blame the cookie banners themselves or the legislation that "made them necessary" but somehow never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites that make them subject to the law. The "cookie banner problem" exists because it's primarily end users that are shouldering the burden of them, and not the companies. For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software engineer to code up a banner. For everyone else, it's thousands of wasted seconds per year. Make the law hit companies where it hurts: their balance sheets.

legitster 2y ago
> never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites Part of the problem is that the law didn't seek to distinguish between tame first-party cookies and the really naughty third-party cookies so the burden is equal regardless of how malicious the service is. > For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software engineer to code up a banner. This is actually not true. There's a lot more that goes into a cookie banner than you might realize, and there's now an industry dominated by a small handful of players (Osano vs OneTrust)
- Rygian 2y ago
  The cookie banner has nothing to do with first -party vs third-party. The cookie banner is required depending on the purpose of the cookies, not the party setting them.
- nicce 2y ago
  > There's a lot more that goes into a cookie banner than you might realize, and there's now an industry dominated by a small handful of players (Osano vs OneTrust) Isn't this industry for those, who want to share their website data automatically with 100+ partners? For others, who don't really share that much data with others, less relevant.
  - legitster 2y ago
    If you are just running a static websites, maybe. But if you are going to run a website with any services on it (video content, eCommerce, member management, etc) you are going to have partners. Establishing a browser session with every single one would be pretty onerous (and honestly much worse for privacy) so a first-party cookie is a pretty good compromise.

legitster 2y ago

This is an example of the potential double-edged sword of passing legislation without input from lobbyists. On one hand, without an industry voice, they passed an amazingly ambitious set of protections. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like there was a technical industry expert who warned them of the implications. (I say that, but the EU bureaucrats that passed this law may actually see the immense numbers of popups as a win still - who knows). A revision is patently obvious to seemingly everyone - revise the law to instead mandate that websites respect the Do Not Track header, or at least have designed a more granular replacement. There's no reason you shouldn't just be able to set it once and your browser tracks it for you.

kalaksi 2y ago

Unfortunately, even without consent banners, there's plenty of unnecessary clicking in this new golden age of (CSS) popups.

elashri 2y ago

I would like to present my opinion that this amount of time is spent dealing with website malicious compliance with EU rules. And it is in general asking people to get tracked and present them with personalized track or share/sell the data to their partners. All of these does not happen and you don't have to do that if you don't track and collect information about your users. Well there are some genuine websites that needs that but I am talking about the general case.

sccomps 2y ago

A lot of those hours might be saved if they mandate a “reject all cookies” button on the cookie banner.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
They do already, and big companies have already been fined for not offering them, which led to some smaller parties adding them. See here [0] for a list, amongst which was Microsoft getting a $65 million fine for not having an easy opt-out on Bing, or $162 million to Google for the same thing. Noncompliance should be reported. [0] https://www.cookieyes.com/blog/cookie-consent-fines/ https://www.cookieyes.com/blog/cookie-consent-fines/
- what 2y ago
  Everyone should just geo block EU visitors instead.
  - taosx 2y ago
    I know a lot of people that wouldn't mind that. 1. There are ways to bypass geo-block. 2. People would build alternatives specifically for EU (with few exceptions). 3. They could even offer those alternatives to US, but with better privacy out of the box.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      On #1, yeah, you can. But don't expect the site to respect the EU laws. I'm all for the hostile corporation to hostilize themselves into complete inaccessibility too. Let them build their castle, with a moat, and not let anyone near them. But unfortunately, they are still smarter than that. (But anyway, they seem to be getting dumber by the minute, so there's still hope.)
  - Sakos 2y ago
    Yeah, fuck everybody else's privacy. /s Why are you like this?

_qua 2y ago

I don't even have the words to express how little I care if companies serve me targeted ads with cookies. On the other hand I absolutely despise what the average visit to website with a cookie banner has become.

dspillett 2y ago
Blame the companies, not the regulations. A significant part of their reasoning behind byzantine stalking permissions banners is that they are deliberately inconveniencing people like you who don't care, so you can be weaponised against those of us who do in discussions about the regulations and related privacy matters.

osm3000 2y ago

I can't believe any of this made a difference in privacy. There is ZERO chance that the law can be enforced here. I've worked in few startups in Europe, no one understand their obligation, let alone the consequences from third party services. This whole cookie banners, and GDPR in general, is as good as literature.

edm0nd 2y ago

rip >404 Not Found

alpaca128 2y ago

Correct headline: User-hostile websites waste 575M hours of Europeans' time every year.

Vagantem 2y ago

Can recommend consent-o-matic Chrome extension which automatically selects "no" to everything! https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdjildafknihdffpkfmmpnpoiajfjnjd https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdj...

edm0nd 2y ago

new URL https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-banners.html https://legiscope.com/blog/hidden-productivity-drain-cookie-...

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

> actively tracking a user beyond their visit to a website is difficult or borderline impossible for website owners, as it would require a court order. I am skeptical of this claim. Partially due to the existence of trackers, beacons, 3rd party cookies and fingerprinting methods. > Identifying users typically requires a court order to process IP addresses And this one as well.

air7 2y ago

I know that I'm in the minority, especially here, but I generally welcome paying with my data. it seems to me that companies need to generate revenue and they do this by extracting something of value from the user and that this thing by definition almost would be something the user isn't happy to just hand over: money, watching ads, electricity for mining crypto, personal data etc. It's some form of payment. for me personally out of all these options giving my data is my least painful payment option for one off services.

immibis 2y ago
Then click the consent button. You have to consent to a payment being extracted from you.

ayaros 2y ago

Why should websites even be trusted with implementing these banners in the first place? Browser vendors should be responsible for implementing these controls per-origin. Give a little banner pop-up built into Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and the rest. Have it display every time a new site sets a cookie for the first time. Or have it reject every cookie by default, unless I whitelist a site. This would result in a consistent user-experience across the board, and I'd actually be able to trust that I'm not being tracked. Instead, we are trusting the very websites we are blaming on tracking us in the most decietful, malicious ways possible to self-regulate and implement these controls. So now every website gets a shitty banner - on top of all the other annoying in-page banners and popups which are a staple of 2020s web design - that asks us if we want cookies. All these banners look different, are positioned differently on the page, appear at different times after the page is loaded, and function differently. So there's no consistency. And 90% of the time you can't disable all the cookies anyway, because there's that little grayed out toggle control for "strictly necessary cookies." How do I know one of those cookies you consider "strictly-necessary" or "crucial for site functionality" doesn't connect back to some evil tracking algorithm, the blocking of which was the whole point of this banner debacle in the first place? So we have essentially asked websites to self-regulate the way the US's vitamin/supplement industury does, except its worse because I don't have to click a fucking banner before I take a capsule of what may or may not be vitamin C. So again, why isn't this the responsibility of browser vendors? Am I taking crazy pills? Am I going insane or is the world going insane? /rant

shiroiushi 2y ago
>Am I going insane or is the world going insane? You haven't been reading the news lately, have you?
- self_awareness 2y ago
  > You haven't been reading the news lately, have you? If you're referring to the US elections, then you might be interested in the fact that not everyone on HN is from US, and not everyone cares.

compootr 2y ago

404ing for me... did this site get hugged to death?

aristofun 2y ago

That what always happens when you give too much power to government - stupid people making stupid ineffective decisions.

jacknews 2y ago

These calculations read like an episode of Silicon Valley. Sure the banners are a stupid idea and a little annoying, but these figures have no merit. There's no way 500m hours of productivity are going to materialize from removing the banners. Removing 'please subscribe' popups, and other ads, now that's altogether different...

amadeuspagel 2y ago

There's a more insidious effect of cookie banners, which is that they make it annoying to follow external links, especially to websites that you haven't visited before. This disadvantages websites built for external links, like HN.

sottol 2y ago

Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by Youtube ads in <world>. <S>OMFG!!! YOUTUBE IS COSTING THE WORLD *750B EUR* PER YEAR. </S> How many hours of productivity are lost to Youtube ads? 2.49 billion active users, average seems to be 29 hours per month, reddit reports 4 ads/10 minutes lately - so 24 ads/hour, 5 seconds each (even though that went up!), so 2mins of ads/hour or 1 hour of ads per month, 12 hours of ads per year! 12 hours * 25 Eur/hour * 2.5B = 750B Eur (probably made some mistakes) Also, this article is ridiculous - like assuming all 400M European internet users are "productive" at 25Eur/h (30% are probably < 15 or > 65), people clicking 1200 banners per year because they visit 100 sites/month (12*100, right?!) and so on.

m3kw9 2y ago

There is cookie banners in the US and canada

kylecazar 2y ago

the angle of wasted productivity on the end-user's side seems ridiculous. If anything, count wasted resources in implementation for little gain for the end-user. "Assuming it takes an average of 5 seconds per interaction with a cookie banner". People don't spend 5 seconds clicking accept. They start reading their website, notice the banner in their periphery shortly after, and click it to go away.

self_awareness 2y ago
I hope you're joking. The banner often obscures the view, and the user need to dismiss it in order to know if the page contains the information user looks for. But in order to dismiss it, you can click "Accept all" easily and job done, OR you need to enter options by clicking the "manage" button, find your way around the banner, understand what are the options and which ones are checked and which are unchecked, then click "consent" or whatever terminology is used, but only after finding the button. This easily can take up to a minute. Yes, sometimes there's the "reject all" button, but not always. Also you need to know how they define the "reject all" button, because sometimes it probably may be defined as "reject some". It's not a problem for me, because I autoclick them away with browser plugins, but when I'm on a mobile, the web is really hard to browse because of those banners.

class4behavior 2y ago

Misleading headline: It's productivity loss caused by non-essential data collection. The EU does not mandate banners, it's the businesses choosing to bully their customers into accepting all tracking and profiling.

GJim 2y ago
Is the right answer. It's stunning the number of people on HN (a tech news site!) who don't realise there is simply no requirement for "cookie banners" UNLESS you are using those cookies to track me or personally identify me (advertisers take a bow)..... In which case you need to ask my explicit permission to do so. And so you should.

pixodaros 2y ago

Now count how much money and time is wasted loading all the spyware of typical commercial websites to generate a tiny value from selling ads and personally identifying information (the mobile data costs alone ...)

semiinfinitely 2y ago

The previous headline was better

bryanrasmussen 2y ago

My opinion is that cookie banners are so bad because of GDPR and not getting rid of the cookie law when GDPR was enacted. Then everybody kept their cookie banners around and folded GDPR requirements into it, making it more complex, and more necessary all over the place, and less likely for people to think do we need these cookies or not and do we need to show this banner because of fear of GDPR (potential fines are big!!)

foxglacier 2y ago

Around the time this started, Google was going to penalize sites in its search ranking if they greeted users with an obtrusive popup. I thought that would strongly discourage cookie banners but then suddenly there was an explosion of stupid popups everywhere - newsletter signups, cookie banners, "special offers", overlaid ads, etc. I guess Google never did that thing?

littlestymaar 2y ago

“Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by companies implementing dark patterns in order to extort used consent” FTFY And you could add an analysis of the productivity cost of those “Subscribe to out newsletter” and “The experience is better on the app” pop-ups please?

d--b 2y ago

This doesn’t take into account the fact that some people just close the website, saving countless minutes of rabbit hole browsing… Oh and 5 seconds is unrealistically high.

snehk 2y ago

The whole law should have been forcing sites to not ignore DoNotTrack bworser settings. It's a prime example of the EU being utterly useless because they don't understand the underlying issue and then choose a "solution" that's as much in your face as possible but doesn't change anything about the original problem. It's the whole plastic straw thing in digital form.

Earw0rm 2y ago
This, exactly. And possibly requiring browser vendors to implement Do Not Track in an accessible and user-friendly way. (Those whose business models are reliant on ads might need a firm nudge there.)
cenamus 2y ago
If only those websites just didn't use cookies when 99% of them don't need them. Easy to display the cookie terror banner and blame the EU while you're using it for "analytics". And the majority isn't even compliant, without a big disable button, instead hiding it through 10 different dark patterns in the cookie setting, where every misclick leads to accepting the whole array of spyware.
jajko 2y ago
Its lazy engineering. Most sites dont need such functionality, but devs are either incompetent to rip it out of libraries they use, are stuck in web design patterns from 20 years ago themselves or its a simple business decision to trade user data. When was the last time you really needed cookies for your business and couldnt get around it with (usually better) tech? Dont blame the system (nonideal but darn good to be in place, compared to literally rest of the world where humans have simply less rights), when its companies failing knowingly basic rules.
mpeg 2y ago
I don't think DNT settings were not considered – they were probably discarded as they hurt user privacy. Fingerprinting tools use the DNT setting as an extra flag to identify the user, so having it set to a non-default means you actually get tracked more, not less.

Animats 2y ago

Exemptions from cookie banners for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) using analytics, tracking user interactions on their websites, and managing basic advertising are imperative to mitigate unnecessary economic and productivity losses. Yeah, right. You don't have to use cookie banners if you don't use cookies. Unless you are running ads or profiling users, you can get equivalent data from server logs.

pmg101 2y ago

Am I literally the only person who this doesn't bother? When I go to a site I click all the xs and buttons until I can see content, without any conscious engagement at all really. Sometimes when you go for a walk in the country there are stiles or gates to climb over and that is also fine. I feel like there's some kind of implied belief here that all interactions with the world should be perfectly frictionless which I think may be more of a niche view than is realised?

sureglymop 2y ago
No. Same here and I agree with you. I think websites having to disclose what third party cookies they save is worth the small inconvenience. And if they maliciously comply, that hopefully leads to further regulations.

uniqueuid 2y ago

I am kind of frustrated by the widespread misunderstandings in this thread. Laws are best when they are abstract, so that there is no need for frequent updates and they adapt to changing realities. The European "cookie law" does not mandate cookie banners, it mandates informed consent. Companies choose to implement that as a banner. There is no doubt that the goals set by the law are sensible. It is also not evident that losing time over privacy is so horrible. In fact, when designing a law that enhances consumer rights through informed consent, it is inevitable that this imposes additional time spent on thinking, considering and acting. It's the whole point, folks! You cannot have an informed case-by-case decision without spending time.

mpeg 2y ago
What I find funny about the whole thing is that the grand majority of companies with cookie banners are not implementing them correctly, and therefore are still in breach of the law. I see constantly banners on sites that set tracking cookies by default, and delete them if you reject them in the banner (or even worse, not delete them at all!) – this is not compliant as the cookies were set before consent was given Also see banners where there is only a big "OK" button, with no visible option to reject, this is also not compliant!
- weinzierl 2y ago
  One way to see it is that it's their way of passive-aggressive protest against a law they don't want. Maybe the aim was never to abide by the law, just to pretend and annoy people enough to draw them on your side.
  - dominicrose 2y ago
    A clear example of passive-aggressive protest was from Google, the removal of links to Google maps from the search results. Instead of providing a choice of multiple map providers, they just completely removed the links. To clarify: I'm in Europe (France).
    - 2y ago

yakcyll 2y ago

The title originally claimed 575M hours spent every year by Europeans on cookie banners. That's 12 seconds on average a day per person. Hardly anything to complain about.

oasisaimlessly 2y ago
An alternative interpretation: "575M hours spent every year by Europeans" = 850 average human lifespans per year Cookie banners in Europe have an effect vaguely comparable to "wasting" 850 human lives per year.
- kalaksi 2y ago
  You can use similar big scary numbers and words for a lot of much worse and more time consuming things.

ChoHag 2y ago

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indulona 2y ago

we have fought 20 years to get rid of popups, then EU comes in and shits all over the internet.

dspillett 2y ago
Nope. Companies, especially ad-tech and other stalkers and the sites/apps who use their services, are doing the shitting. Nothing in the relevant regulations, from the EU, California, or anywhere else, in any way mandates the inconvenience that these companies are creating for you.
- indulona 2y ago
  well, technically you are correct, since the consent is required only for non-essential cookies. which means third party / tracking cookies.

Gys 2y ago

The numbers are much lower I think, at least nowadays. > On average, a user visits about 100 websites per month, totaling 1,200 websites per year. The number of 100 websites per month is pulled out of thin air. Following the links it seems to be based on the number of web PAGES visited DAILY by Americans in 2007. In my anecdata most people are online a lot but mostly in just a few apps and websites. So I guess all numbers in the article should be much much lower.

sensanaty 2y ago

And how much time is wasted clicking away mailing list banners, popup ads, trying to parse the real download button on a page, watching through unskippable video ads, trying to decipher which part of a website is the article vs an ad etc?

devilmoon 2y ago

So, about 1 and a half hours per European every year? That's pretty good to avoid gifting my data to adtech shitheads

cameldrv 2y ago

Think about this: Cookie banners are only a small part of how bad UI wastes people's time. Computers could be so much more useful if more care was put into UI for widely used applications and OSes.

bogeholm 2y ago

It’s interesting to consider the opportunity cost of these 1.42 hours/year, which the study completely misses. What would I have contributed to my GDP in the 5 seconds it took to ‘Reject all’ on Reddit?

satokausi 2y ago

This calculation somehow assumes that clicking banners on your free time equals lost money in terms of production. If the average time for toilet visits per day is 12 minutes, we are losing 89.8 million hours a day collectively across Europe, and continuing the same logic in as in the article, with 25€/h this sums to 5% of EU GDP being spent down the drain. Maybe we should focus efforts on a productivity programme to ban bathroom visits?

elric 2y ago
That's very much apples and oranges. One is a biological necessity, while the other is a consequence of surveillance capitalism.
hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
There are a few assumptions there that make me scratch my head 1. the general 'utility' of informing users about cookies (or giving them the opportunity) and getting 'consent' is completely ignored. 2. The time spent is assumed to be 'working' productive time, not leisure time 3. They ignore the existence of tools that automate these (auto accept/reject) At this point, why not calculate the 'economic costs' of every activity we do outside of work? I imagine reading and watching TV and movies would have massive productivity hits...

ordu 2y ago

I'm not sure I can accept their calculations. For example, I use "I do not care about cookies" + "Cookie AutoDelete". The first one claims it accepts only necessary cookies, closing or hiding all banners, while the second deletes all cookies when I leave the site. I spend ~0sec on these banners. How many are there people like me? The authors say nothing about this solution and it seems to me that they are not aware of the possibility of the automation. They just assume that each banner costs 5 seconds. Why 5 seconds? It is an eternity, to pick "reject" and click on it would take 0.5 seconds or so, wouldn't it? Yeah, I know, there are sites that do not allow just reject all and force you to uncheck a several dozen of checkboxes one by one, but these sites eat much more time than 5 seconds, it is more like 50 seconds. Maybe 5 seconds is an average value across all sites? But how it was calculated? But I agree, that the situation is stupid. It would be better to have a standard API common for all sites, that will allow addons to accept and reject cookies based on the user settings.

illiac786 2y ago

To the companies out there with shitty cookie banners: just stop tracking. No more banner, no annoyed users, better engagement of your end users.

diffeomorphism 2y ago

Short reality check. Browsers support default "no" since forever. The websites just refuse to accept it and insist on wasting your time out of spite. So modest proposal: Make these websites pay 575€ million/year for wasting citizens' time or have them accept that "no" means "no".

ApolloFortyNine 2y ago

Lots of people here saying the banners are simply unnecessary, but with untargeted advertising paying over 90% less, it simply is necessary for any website with ads. If you got told tomorrow you had to start every conversation with "are you okay if I remember this" or you lose 90% of your salary, guess what you'd do.

atoav 2y ago

It is literally that meme where the guy pushes a stick into the spokes of his own bicycle only to blame others. You don't need to ask people for their consent if you do not store personal data client side to track them. There are clear definitions what is personal and what isn't, you can store cookies for legitimate reasons which are also clearly outlined. So if you don't want to ask for consent, you can avoid that by not doing things that require it.

tim333 2y ago

I wonder if anyone surveyed Europeans to see if they want the things? I get them in the UK and would be happier without them myself.

spygarapna2001 2y ago

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