As a user, these laws bring me nothing but annoyance. Not only do I get a cookie warning on many sites but now also a GDPR interstitial to click through.

And dozens of emails about updated terms. Not to mention that some sites now require a non-EU proxy.

All to solve a problem that was 100% solved a decade ago with a simple adblock. I can't imagine a more effective anti-EU campaign than these Internet laws.

You get a GDPR interstitial allowing you to opt out of tracking. I'm not sure how you could adblock your way out of Foursquare selling your location to advertisers.

I already opted out of tracking by blocking the vast majority of trackers. All that without clicking through a single warning or receiving a single email.

I have also opted out of Foursquare (and Facebook, and many other services of very dubious value) by not using it. The main obstacle that stops Foursquare from selling my location history is not having anything to sell.

If, on the other hand, that opting out requires clicking through a slew of warnings every time I visit a website, I'd rather see my browsing history sold to advertisers. Frankly, I'd like an EU_CITIZEN_WHO_DOES_NOT_CARE browser header to opt out of all these protections.

It’s great that you can give informed consent, but the average person has no idea what tech can or cannot do. I regularly amaze people by showing them Google Translate’s AR mode, and that tech was demonstrated 7.5 years ago, their knowledge of surveillance technology is so poor that describing standard business practices makes me sound like a conspiracy nut to many of them.

Governments are just as out of touch, judging by a UK cyber-security report that the BBC reported on a few months ago, or by the way Zuckerberg and the US Congress interacted.

You can't not use Facebook unless you block also access to their servers; they have content on the majority of websites.

Then you have no problem, you can simply stop using all these services that give you the annoying GDPR popups, like you did with Foursquare. Problem solved.

No, I can't because the EU mandated all these random sites I visit from Google to show these warnings.

This law is only about copyright. I'm all for supporting user privacy with the GDPR but I don't want to support outdated copyright holders with stupid taxes.

Sure, but it's hardly a trend. This is the first (pair of) bad laws I'm aware of recently.

Have you considered that users can think for themselves, that we might not have to spoon-feed them? :-)

Playing devil's advocate here (and I think like you) but you're in a minority group just by virtue of being on this site, the average end user that isn't you is really stupid about tech issues and wants "protection" (or some other self serving issue).

Thus, we get dumb laws by politicians so they can point to what they have done for the average user that has no understanding of how any of the internet works. The web of today for me has really just turned into a problem of critical mass. For example, Google Eternal September[1], early adopters (nerds) have been going through this problem on the internet for awhile, and I honestly feel like it's never going to get better for us.

C'est la vie.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Some users have time and inclination. But, by analogy, I don’t have time or inclination to become an expert in pharmacology in order to decide for myself which medicine I should take — I just go to a doctor and assume the law requires them to be completent, private, and not-corrupted-by-gifts-from-drug-companies.

(Flawed analogy, because the website malicious JavaScript analogy would be, what, also having to assume their nerves haven’t been spliced with wires leading to a remote control?)