It's not the law that's the problem (well, ok, it is perhaps poorly structured to even allow these things to happen...) but in the end it's malicious compliance of all those sites that put up the banners. The law doesn't require banners. Just don't set any cookies unless they're fulfilling a user intent (such as logging in or a shopping cart), those don't need explicit opt-in.

I agree, but it's mostly in the poor implementation where that law fails, the idea behind it wasn't bad.

I think it can still be fixed by stipulating: if the browser sends you an X-Privacy header with some well defined content then you are not allowed to show a popup and you should use the content of that header instead. The exact content of that header needs to be fleshed out but should offer a lot of customisation to keep 90% of the people happy. I'm sure mod builders and browser makers would come up with a convenient way to set that header just once and then the problem would go away.

This was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track and it did not work. Surveillance capitalism is just worth too much to websites to even pay lip service to user privacy.

The only thing that works is having your user-agent mercilessly chop the survelliance shit out of web pages. Don't evaluate it, don't render it. Because thw websites will forever be hostile to your interests while they can enrich themselves by datamining you.

It didn't work because there was no law backing it. It's purely a "voluntary self-regulation mechanism".

Voluntary self-regulation doesn't work on greedy assholes who don't care how much of the web they make unusable as long as they get an extra 0.0003¢ per page view.

I'm aware of that header, but respecting it is voluntary, which is highly unlikely to work if there is a strong monetary incentive not to comply.

It's also pretty coarse. I may want to allow a site I like to collect analytics to help them out, I may even want a search engine to keep track of my behaviour to give me better results. Just an on/off, where IE has set the default to off, was never going to work.

If Global Privacy Control takes off it will be much like Do Not Track, except with legal power, in some jurisdictions at least.

https://globalprivacycontrol.org/#about

Because every website decides that it is fine to show the annoying popup even though they don't use the data they collect. I wonder if there is a way to give incentives to do it better for the user.

Many websites becomes huge apps for no reason, e-mails abuse HTML and are usually unreadable in plain/text, etc. It's not even clear to me if that makes those websites more successful or if it is just cargo cult ("we have to look modern like the others").

But users mostly don't give a shit and won't support those who e.g. don't track them and therefore don't show the cookie popup.

I don't see a way to solve this, though...