It's a workaround if a website manages to make users accept cookies that would otherwise refuse just by making it so inconvenient UI wise to refuse them. The limits and edge cases on this may be subjective but then again so are most laws.

Why do you consider something nonsense just because it’s a subjective judgement call?

Lots of things are subjective judgement calls. They are not all nonsense.

Many people sadly have this mindset that if something is not explicitly and comprehensively spelt out then anything goes, therefore any complaints for bad implementations is purely on the regulations for not being explicit and comprehensive enough. Now, obviously, there's SOME truth to this, but too often people think in black and white.

I often think it usually goes the other way. If a regulation is too specifically defined, it often ends up having gaping holes and other issues.

Most of our longest standing torts and crimes have subjectivity right at their core, and I'd argue that's not a coincidence but survivorship bias.

The world just isn't black and white, and attempts to legislatively render it so inevitably cause problems (though, obviously too much subjectivity and something because uselessly vague; it's a tricky balancing act for sure).

Depends on the legislative culture. For example, from the Copywrongs talk from now Felix Reda:

> The other legal tradition underlying the EU copyright system which is the continental European tradition of droit d’auteur (or Author's Rights). In this system, the authors of cultural works have certain inalienable rights that they cannot sell to a right holder. And, importantly, the exceptions to copyright, the interests of the public are written into the law. [...] The problem with the continental system is that it is quite inflexible because every time a new technological development comes about, you have to change the law to allow this type of use without a copyright infringement. So every new way of dealing with culture is fobidden by default. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL_Wxu6x1HU

Whereas other legislative cultures prefer to set a general framework, then leave the details to the Courts and or to Government ministers.

The rules are very clear: if you collect personal data¹ for other purposes than legitimate interest you need to give people an easy choice to deny that collection and the service should not be worse because of it.

I mean the EU published a guideline on what it calls deceptive design patterns. They are quite clear there with what is unacceptable (link to PDF): https://edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2023-02/edpb_03-2022_gui...

When even Google felt they had to make "reject all" equally big and not hise it in a sub menu, you know that everything else is likely not legal.

¹: whether you use cookies for it or not doesn't matter

I think you're misunderstanding what the poster was talking about. You're taking "the popups we see today were never recommended nor required by the original regs" to mean that the popups have become something that wasn't intended by the regulation (but the regulation did require popups).

I think that the poster was saying that the popups themselves as a concept were never recommended nor required by the regulations.

> but the regulation did require popups

Yeah I guess the word "require" has a few interpretations. The regulation didn't explicitly require popups, it required user consent IFF a company wants to collect/process/sell data the company doesn't need, but the intent was that companies would not do this, with consent being the exception, and the mechanism of consent was neither prescribed nor a focus: it certainly wasn't annoying popups per reg.

The regularion required informed consent. Nobody ever said it has to be done with popups. This is what people ended up doing afterwards.

Only when deceptive patterns became clear the EU made clear that allowing one simple "ok" option and a million convoluted ways to say "no" is not resulting in informed consent.

Wheter you us a popup or hide it in a menu with the default of not tracking does not matter.