The regulation explicitly forbids annoying banners, the problem is that there’s currently zero enforcement of it so websites continue breaching it and lying to themselves (and others) by thinking their consent banners are compliant.

>The regulation explicitly forbids annoying banners

You have to love how the regulator did not even try to define what they mean by "annoying". Thus making the whole law completely useless.

In my book, any single pixel of my limited screen real estate that gets dedicated to this useless regulation is annoying. If the EU wants to enforce this, they need to provide a way for me to basically say "Yes, I agree with all tracking cookies for all sites forever", and never see a banner again.

But that’s exactly my point. Why regulate if things get worse. If you regulate think about enforcing beforehand. What’s the use?

Enforcement is already happening. Multiple confirmed cases of fines being handed out to businesses, organisations etc :-)

More importantly IMO they are also contacting entities up front to tell them about violations and how to get compliant, the fines we have seen yet seems (again IMO) to be only for particularly nasty cases and/or cases where the entities in question refuses to change.

This means the fines we are seeing is just the top of the iceberg: most changes happens underneath the surface and only trickles up in the form of less annoying websites (or fines) little by little.

I take the time to check what I'm agreeing to.

By law it's default opt out for non-essential usages specifically to deal with people who are annoyed, but not everyone plays by the rules.

Yeah, maybe. But not by clever design. The opt-out boxes are usually designed as secondary buttons. The opt-in is designed as primary button. So if you want to change something you have to really think and make a deliberate choice, whereas most people in that moment just want to see the damn content of the site.

That's because the website operators deliberately design the experience to be obnoxious and frustrating.

They want you to have a bad experience if you decide to opt-out of detailed behavioural tracking, so that you'll feel pressured to "consent" to detailed behavioural tracking, and so you'll feel like the GDPR is to blame, even though it isn't.

I've put "consent" in quotes because it's not freely given consent if you are heavily pressured into it, and it's not consent at all if you end up believing you don't really have a choice.

These banners/dialogs do not even comply with the GDPR (despite saying the GDPR requires them), as GDPR says consent to non-essential personal data collection about you must be as easy to withdraw as it is to give, and the service you get must be the same if you don't consent as if you do.

I wrote a bit more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25441131

Same here. and I'm on ublock origin and the rest. It's just ghastly, of all the scams (tech support and more) and other misery on the internet, the EU is just absolutely fixated on some of these random things.