Not necessarily. Only if personal data is collected by the third party.

I thought that with the recent changes to PECR they that clarified any non-essential cookie-like technology needs permission, irrespective of whether it's first party or pseudonymous. And additionally that analytics does not count as strictly necessary.

That seems to be the advice of the UK ICO: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-a...

You need to notify users, and give them an opt-out, if the cookies are not strictly necessary for the provision of the service.

Analytics cookies are not strictly necessary.

All I want to see are pageviews. That shouldn’t require cookies/fingerprints.

It shouldn't, but nowadays it always does.

Alternatively your pagecount will shoot to the millions if you have someone holding f5.

To be fair, most of them probably do. It's not like the introduction of GDPR in Europe 2 years ago suddenly made all of the shit a marketing dept shoves into Google Tag Manager completely legit and above board.

These third parties will take what you give them and _also_ take what they can get from your browser if you're embedding their script. Are you going to proxy those scripts as well to stop them getting the user's IP address and then geolocating it to grab even more info?

The cookie warning banner is bullshit only in the sense that it achieves nothing. Accept it or deny it, it won't change a thing. Same with the tracking consent popups: despite the law saying they should be opt-in by default, they're still treated as opt-out by default, meaning that all of these sites _still_ collect your data because you're blacklisting individual sites from tracking, as opposed to whitelisting them. You need to set a cookie to say that you don't want tracking and not thousands of cookies to say you do want it?

That's being tracked... it's all wrong. Literally everything you offer as information, or don't offer, is another node in their graph.

It really shits me that a lot of them you can't even deny it. They just have a button like "I understand".

WTF is that...

Or they treat continuing to use the site as consent. Some of them are really passive-aggressive about it too. I've seen cookie banners with wording like "We use cookies, because duh, who doesn't in 2020? Click here or keep using the site to accept."

Completely at odds with the whole "informed consent" thing.

And then they wonder why we use things like uBlock, which are pretty much the only tools we can rely on to genuinely revoke consent. Or revoke as much of it as possible.