> Anyone who wasn't able to predict these annoying popups after HTML5 and GDPR, is seriously blind.

Have you read the GDPR, though? Because in no way does it require "cookie consent", incidentally, neither did the previous "cookie law". The consent forms I've seen so far are all willfull misinterpretation, dark patterns, or both.

95% (if not more) of non-shady uses of cookies do not require consent, and thus don't need a consent popup. If you do implement one on your website it means one of several things:

1) You did not actually read or understand when/why you need consent

2) You did read it/don't understand, but are unable to figure out where all the stuff on your site is actually coming from and are thus unsure about the implications

3) You actually need consent (in case you are hosed anyway, you can't predicate usage on consent, so there's 0 motivation for users to ever consent)

4) Your purposely trying to annoy EU residents in hopes they will lobby against GDPR back in the EU

5) You're blindly copying what other people are doing, because thinking is hard.

Ah, I see you've never talked with a legal team.

1. Is there risk?

2. Does adding a consent screen reduce or remove risk?

3. Is the risk reduction from 2 less than the cost?

Congrats, now every website in the world gets a cookie consent screen even if not technically required.

The problem is probably that it’s a European-style law, being read by U.S. lawyers. Those lawyers interpret every word strictly and worry about what the most negative interpretation might mean, and assign risk accordingly. European lawyers know that the spirit and guidelines are what matter, and say “as long as you can plausibly show that you made a good-faith effort to comply with the stated intention of the law, you’re fine.”

See, I'd be with you with this interpretation, were it not for the fact that a solid >70% of consent screens I've seen blatantly violate the GDPR in a number of ways, so if this process is what happened, legal done fucked up.

Not "subtly getting a minor detail wrong", but "doing something that is explicitly mentioned as not allowed" levels of wrong.

Unfortunately I had to read it for my own website, and have applied it properly. But I'm technical and can actually understand it.

But 99% of businesses owners went to full panic mode and went straight to your point 5. "Our website needs such a popup".

Do you think the general public now understand cookies? Of course they don't.

Seemed all pretty obvious to me.

But it's not cookie consent, it's tracking consent.

Yeah in your day websites were websites where you could read stuff. But today they’re massive interactive applications. It’s not even remotely the same.

Well, I don't want an article to be interactive.

I so agree with this. I find the level of admiration for this painful law absurd.

I'm stuck in Europe. I was fine without the GDPR. Now, I waste my time clicking "accept" because I don't have time to deal with this crap. Meanwhile, my university has hired what my stepfather would have called a "tweety little person" to police GDPR regulations. God knows what she does (she doesn't). God knows in what single way she has improved a single person's life. But she has a job now, and by God, she'll fight for it.

I care about privacy, but there were options to manage this already - like browser extensions. You could download them if you cared, and if you didn't want to, you didn't have to. Government regulation, demanded by zealots, has added one hundred tiny frustrations per day to millions of ordinary people, caused an expensive pain to thousands of small websites, and created a new, wholly useless compliance industry.

And is Facebook tracking me any less? Ha ha ha. Facebook can afford lawyers.

Wow, finally a like minded person!

The argument I always hear is "Ordinary people don't know about cookies so it's the websites responsibility". As if ordinary people now understand cookies.

It's all a big fiasco, supported by people who think theory works in practice.