No, it's the EU that mandated those popups - an asinine solution to the tracking problem. The EU gets the blame.
Same difference. Semantics.
> You could simply not track and then you wouldn't need consent.
Not all tracking is malicious. It's not going to disappear, hence the popups.
As I said, it's an asinine solution. It's as useless as the default browser nonsense. The EU seems to make one of these annoying blunders every decade or so, next one should be coming up.
That's simply not true.
The EU legislated solution is directly responsible for the popup spam. There were other alternate solutions that would not lead to popup spam.
Your site may not need a popup, but many more complex sites do, and not because they are doing nefarious things.
It's OK to admit the EU makes bonehead decisions sometimes.
Until the GDPR a lot of this went on anyway, but totally invisible, now at least we have some idea of the magnitude of the problem and companies have an incentive to at least try to get it right. Not that many of them do. People that are categorically against government regulation tend to point at this and say 'see: that's what you get'. But they forget that in the relationship between companies and individuals it is the companies that on balance have the most power and there is ample evidence that this power then gets abused. Hence regulation. I'm all for tightening the rules another notch or two and adding a zero to the average fine. Because there is still a lot of room for improvement.