The cookie law is like those plaque disclosing tablets you can chew to figure out if you are brushing right.

If your teeth turn out blighted all blue/purple, you generally don't blame the tablets. ;-)

Ha! Following your analogy ... then you just discover that everyone’s teeth are purple and you’re struggling to concentrate on what they’re saying because it’s distracting. Meanwhile, nobody’s teeth got any cleaner.

It’s really just theatre and on balance it makes the internet a crummier experience.

Actually, there's plenty of people with white teeth.

Meanwhile, the intent is to avoid the people with purple teeth until they learn to brush responsibly. ;-)

(Or if you truly must interact with them: use a lot of ad blockers and privacy tools; because you know what you're getting into)

I'm totally good with there being laws about this as I too want to see less tracking and data sharing. But the implementation is terrible and anybody who thinks that it's fixed anything at all is just kidding themselves.

I would rather bad actors were punished and enforced cookie banners were eliminated.

Well, that's why the GDPR tried to get rid of them. Of course people now put up GDPR barriers ;-)

It's really hard to legislate against something that some people really want to do :-/

I think we can both agree on that. People have reacted somewhat negatively to my original comment, but I suspect cookie banners have done more harm than good on balance. It’s one of those things where the spirit of the movement got lost.

We were discussing something in a similar vein the other day regarding a security form for an enterprise contract and my reoccurring response was “officially or actually?” There tends to be a big gap between official compliance and what was originally desired.

Many years ago I worked with a mega mega corp that required a complex form with every change request, but they still ran my script that escalated my database permissions because they ran it as root.