Please stop putting cookie pop-ups on your website (2022)

Here's the twist: Good news is (for me), I can[1] track and do whatever I want with any other IP address. You visit my site? Well, thanks to nobody else I care about having GDPR-like regulations in place, I can make sure I'll not only track you down and display ads across all advertiser networks, feed them your visit in all imaginable and unimaginable ways, but I can do it in such a targeted way that it's borderline scary. I can literally use any information you gave me on my websites, like your name, your location, proximity to anything. And if I can't then the advertiser can. And in the case of that particular lawsuit mentioned in the article, collecting all user consents, their IP addresses, and basically which websites they visited, its like a gold mine for advertisiers. If it isn't one yet, it can be turned into one with the click of a button.

It's like that one case a few years back, where a health insurance company bought a bank and started closing bank accounts from people they knew were risk patients.

Simply connect the dots...

GDPRs promise was to make it harder to do so. It wasn't the plan to annoy the hell out of everyone with banners. The whole idea was to not allow tracking unless you opted in, because quite frankly, its scary.

And no, I'm not a fan of GDPR or overregulation. But in reality, there hasn't been any tech I've come across that really protects the non-technical internet users at large. There's uBlock and plugins, but not installed by default or built into standard mobile browsers. Apple might be close for regular consumers to stop the excessive tracking and companies like FB really hates them for it (for good reason, it costs them big $$). Google will never shoot their own foot by integrating non-tracking tech into any of their products.

So, no, my opinion is don't stop that darn annoying cookie pop-ups unless you also stop the tracking. If you stop the tracking, remove the cookie pop-up. As easy as that.

[1] I don't do it, but I could. I'm not a reckless psycho-marketer.

1. Because the implementation is simply left open?

2. Because it's nearly impossible to verify?

Targeting advertising is sooo much more effective for small and medium sized businesses and actually makes many businesses viable in a way they weren’t in the past.

The ideal solution would be to find a way for businesses to get those insights in a way that preserves privacy at the individual level. Something like apples differential privacy system but web wide.

I'm starting to question that, but without any proof that just me rambling. Assuming that it works, I'd actually be fine with a site saying "Hey, just letting you know, we use Google Analytics to learn more about you, is that cool?".

The 1500 partners and 50+ trackers aren't numbers I'm making up, those are numbers I frequently see. Sure, you feel you need a tracker, I can easily enough say no to a single tracker. I can also understand a webshop needing to share information with their advertising partner, but not 1500 of them.

The law would never have amounted to anything if the reality was a limited scope of data sharing with a clear obvious purpose. It's the insane amount of tracking and data sharing that triggered all this.