> Banner gets a lot of attention because of the never-ending annoyance it's causing. It's like being surprised that someone would care about something so small as a little rock in their shoe.
No one is surprised that anyone is annoyed by the banners. But it doesn’t make sense to be annoyed at the law¹ instead of the perpetrators. If someone is deliberately putting pebbles in your shoes you should get annoyed at the person doing it, not the pebble.
The GDPR doesn’t require websites to have those banners², nor do they require them to be annoying³. That’s a choice the websites make. Every time you are annoyed at the GDPR because of those banners, you have been manipulated by the website to be mad at the wrong thing.
Imagine restaurants are pissing in their soup. This has become so rampant that a law comes out saying that if you pee in soup, you must warn your customers and give them the option for a pee-free soup. Restaurant then start serving you soup but before letting you eat force you to unwrap hundreds of layers of cellophane. You get so mad at it, “I just want to eat my soup, I don’t care about the pee, what a stupid law”. You should instead be mad that they were pissing in your soup in the first place, and when you see a restaurant doing the cellophane shenanigan you should leave in search of another which doesn’t pee in your soup.
¹ Unless you are annoyed that it is too lenient and think there should’ve been no option at all and that data collection should’ve been outright forbidden, not given a “consent” option that is abused.
² You can choose to not disregard people’s privacy.
³ Quite the contrary, the law requires that rejection be as easy as acceptance.