How can you comply with the current requirements without cookie banners? Why would EU governments use cookie banners if they are just nonsense meant to degrade approval of GDPR?
EU law requires you to use cookie banners if your website contains cookies that are not required for it to work. Common examples of such cookies are those used by third-party analytics, tracking, and advertising services.
[...] we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really.
When I open this link I'm greeted with the cookies banner
"We use optional cookies to improve your experience on our websites and to display personalized advertising based on your online activity. If you reject optional cookies, only cookies necessary to provide you the services listed above will be used. You may change your selection on which cookies to accept by clicking "Manage Cookies" at the bottom of the page to change your selection. This selection is maintained for 180 days. Please review your selections regularly. "
By not tracking and setting any third party cookies. Just using strictly functional cookies is fine, just put a disclaimer somewhere in the footer and explain as those are already allowed and cannot be disabled anyway.
The EU's own government websites are polluted with cookie banners. They couldn't even figure out how to comply with their own laws except to just spam the user with cookie consent forms.
By not putting a billion trackers on your site and also by not using dark patterns. The idea was a simple yes or no. It became: "yes or click through these 1000 trackers" or "yes or pay". The problem is that it became normal to just collect and hoard data about everyone.
Again, then why does the EU do this? Clearly its not simply about erroding confidence in GDPR if the EU is literally doing it themselves.
Besides, you seem to be confusing something.
GDPR requires explicit explanation of each cookie, including these 1000s of trackers. It in no way bans these. This is just GDPR working as intended - some people want to have 1000s of trackers and GDPR makes them explain each one with a permission.
Maybe it would be nice to not have so many trackers. Maybe the EU should ban trackers. Maybe consumers should care about granular cookie permissions and stop using websites that have 1000s of them because its annoying as fuck. But some companies do prefer to have these trackers and it is required by GDPR to confront the user with the details and a control.
No. You asked How can you comply with the current requirements without cookie banners? Not How can you have trackers and comply with the current requirements without cookie banners? And don't use dark patterns would have answered this question as well.
>No. You asked How can you comply with the current requirements without cookie banners?
Within the context of the discussion of if its malicious compliance or a natural consequence of the law. Obviously you could have a website with 0 cookies but thats not the world we live in. Maybe you were hoping GDPR would have the side effect of people using less cookies? It in no way requires that though.
I mean just think of it this way. Company A uses Scary Dark Pattern. EU makes regulation requiring information and consent from user for companies that use Scary Dark Pattern. Company A adds information and consent about Scary Dark Pattern.
Where is the malicious compliance? The EU never made tracker cookies or cookies over some amount illegal.
> Within the context of the discussion of if its malicious compliance or a natural consequence of the law.
You ignored I said don't use dark patterns answered the question you meant to ask.
> Obviously you could have a website with 0 cookies but thats not the world we live in. Maybe you were hoping GDPR would have the side effect of people using less cookies?
We were discussing trackers. Not cookies.
> I mean just think of it this way. Company A uses Scary Dark Pattern. EU makes regulation requiring information and consent from user for companies that use Scary Dark Pattern. Company A adds information and consent about Scary Dark Pattern.
I will not think of it using an unnecessary and incorrect analogy. And writing things like Scary Dark Pattern is childish and shows bad faith.
> Where is the malicious compliance? The EU never made tracker cookies or cookies over some amount illegal.
The malicious compliance is the dark patterns you ignored. Rejecting cookies was much more complicated than accepting them. Users were pressured to consent by constantly repeating banners. The “optimal user experience” and “accept and close” labels were misleading. These were ruled not compliance in fact.[1] But the companies knew it was malicious and thought it was compliance.
Ignoring Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control and presenting a cookie banner is a dark pattern as well.
They generally don't, because you don't need banners to store cookies that you need to store to have a working site.
In other words, if you see cookie banner, somebody is asking to store/track stuff about you that's not really needed.
Cookie banners were invented by the market as a loophole to continue dark patterns and bad practices. EU is catching flak because its extremely hard to legislate against explicit bad actors abusing loopholes in new technology.
But yeah, blame EU.
And before you go all "but my analytics is needed to get 1% more conversion on my webshop": if you have to convince me to buy your product by making the BUY button 10% larger and pulsate rainbow colors because your A/B test told you so, I will happily include that in the category "dark patterns".
Let's not deceive ourselves -- first-party analytics are much, much harder to set up, and a lot less people are trained on other analytics platforms.
They're also inherently less trustworthy when it comes to valuations and due diligence, since you could falsify historical data yourself, which you can't do with Google.
The regulation is only concerned with cookies that are not required to provide the service. It makes no differentiation between first party and third party - if you use cookies for anything optional (like analytics) you need consent. So you can have third party non-cookie analytics for example without a banner.
Do you know an analytics service that actually does this? I've seen a bunch of "consentless" analytics solutions that seem to be violating GDPR one way or another because they use the IP address as an identifier (or as part of one).
Can you actually do meaningful analytics without the banner at all? You need to identify the endpoint to deduplicate web page interactions and this isn't covered under essential use afaik. I think this means you need consent though I don't know if this covered under GDPR or ePrivacy or one of the other myriad of regulations on this.
So take the IP, browser agent, your domain name and some other browser identifiers, stick them together and run them through SHA3-256, now you have a hash you can use for deduplication. You can even send this hash to a 3rd party service.
Or assign the user an anonymous session cookie that lasts an hour but contains nothing but a random GUID.
Or simply pipe your log output through a service that computes stats of accessed endpoints.
I think this scheme still requires consent since you are processing pseudo anonymous identifiers that fall under personal information without the essential function basis. Hashing is considered insufficient under the GDPR iirc. Have you asked a lawyer about this?
> You need to identify the endpoint to deduplicate web page
You can deduplicate but you cannot store or transmit this identity information. The derived stats are fine as long as it’s aggregated in such a way that preserves anonymity
No one needs to deduplicate over a longer period than a few minutes, or a single session. If you need that, then you're doing something shady. If a user visits your site, clicks a few things, leaves and comes back two hours later, you don't need know if it's the same person or not. The goal of analytics is to see how people in general use your website, not how an individual person use your website.
So just take IP address, browser details, your domain name, and a random ID you stick in a 30 minute session cookie. Hash it together. Now you have token valid for 30 minutes you can use for deduplication but no way of tying it back to particular user (after 30 minutes). And yes, if the user changes browser preferences, then they will get a new hash, but who cares?
> No one needs to deduplicate over a longer period than a few minutes, or a single session. If you need that, then you're doing something shady. If a user visits your site, clicks a few things, leaves and comes back two hours later, you don't need know if it's the same person or not.
Sure you do if for example you want to know how many unique users browse your site per day or month. Which is one of the most commonly requested and used metrics.
> So just take IP address, browser details, your domain name, and a random ID you stick in a 30 minute session cookie.
That looks a lot like a unique identifier which does require a user's consent and a cookie banner.
> Now you have token valid for 30 minutes you can use for deduplication but no way of tying it back to particular user (after 30 minutes)
The EU Court of Justice has ruled in the past that hashed personal data is still personal data.
> And yes, if the user changes browser preferences, then they will get a new hash, but who cares?
It will also happen after 30 minutes have passed which will happen all the time.
> Not rocket science.
And yet your solution is illegal according to the GDPR and does still not fulfil the basic requirement of returning the number of unique users per day or month.
In terms of whether or not the ubiquity of cookie banners is malicious compliance or if it was an inevitable consequence of GDPR, it doesnt matter if trackers are good or necessary. GDPR doesn't ban them. So having them and getting consent is just a normal consequence.
We can say, "Wouldn't it have been nice if the bad UX of all these cookies organically led to the death of trackers," but it didn't. And now proponents of GDPR are blaming companies for following GDPR. This comes from confusing the actual law with a desired side effect that didn't materialize.
> And now proponents of GDPR are blaming companies for following GDPR.
Not really, proponents of GDPR are aware that GDPR explicitly blocking trackers would be extremely hard as there is a significant gray area where cookies can be useful but non-essential, so you'd have to define very specifically what constitutes a tracker or do a blanket ban and hurt legitimate use-cases. Both are bad.
For some reason though people think that the body that institutes laws that try to make the world a better place, when loopholes are found and abused for profit, this is somehow the standard body making a mistake, rather than each individual profit-seeking loophole-abusing entity being the problematic and blame-worthy actor.
I never understand why, I guess you work somewhere that makes money off of this.
This. I don't know why there's a heavy overlap between the "GDPR didn't go far enough" people and not actually reading the GRPR. I'd think they would overlap a lot with people who actually read it.
I dont think you actually need a cookie for that, technically. But I take your point.
What about trackers which they want to set immediately on page load? Just separate prompts for each seems worse than 1 condensed view. You might say "but trackers suck - I don't care about supporting a good UX for them" and it would be hard to disagree. But I'm making the point that its not malicious compliance. It would be great if people didn't use trackers but that is the status quo and GDPR didn't make theme illegal. Simply operating as normal plus new GDPR compliance clearly isnt malicious. The reality is cookie banners everywhere was an inevitable consequence of GDPR.
> But I'm making the point that its not malicious compliance.
It’s totally technically feasible to have a non-blocking opt-in box.
But sites effectively make a legally mandated opt-in dialog into an opt-out dialog by making it block the site. Blocking the page loading until the banner is dismissed is definitely malicious, and arguably not compliant at all.
And lets not get started on all the sites where the banner is just non-functional smoke screen.
But some companies prefer to have trackers. They are required by GDPR to explain each cookie and offer a control for permissions. They probably had trackers before GDPR too. So how is that malicious compliance? They are just operating how they did before except now they are observing GDPR.
It sounds like maybe you just want them to ban trackers. Or for people to care more about trackers and stop using websites with trackers (thereby driving down trackers) Great. Those are all great. But none of them happened and none of that is dictated by GDPR.
You can have first party trackers. That is not so hard. Every site onto itself is a first party tracker, but if your developers can't do it there are opensource solutions available to host.
1p solutions still require consent since the analytics banners are also there to enable processing of personal information in the first place (on the most primitive level IP address)
