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"can we track you" is not a scary proposition, this is the only objective fact.

"Can we show you ads that are closely related to your interests" and "Are you willing to share some data so we can improve our product?" are not facts, they are excuses like "fight terrorist" and "protect the children". And not as good, because nobody would object protecting children while some people do for the former.

The reality is rather "can we get enough data so we can manipulate you better in order to make more money?", "can we create a knowledge graph powerful enough to kill all our competition and influence democracy in our favor?" and "can we follow you everywhere to prey on you once we know enough to find a way in your life?"

You think those sentences don't reflect reality? I think they are as realistic as yours.

So the law finds a middle ground and use facts: "do you accept tracking?". Simple. Objective.

> This is still an annoying banner somewhere.

A non modal notification, just like stated in the original comment, is not a banner. It can be safely ignored, doesn't prevent you from getting to the content, nor require you to act or take a decision to progress.

I mean, you just stated that tons of people are ready to accept obnoxious interruptions in the form of ads that benefit corporations, and you think a small notification on the bottom right on the screen to benefit the consumer is unacceptable?

I'm answering your comment for the sake of other readers, but given how much bad faith I felt in it, I'm expecting any answer would be of the same caliber and will just ignore them.

> The reality is rather "can we get enough data so we can manipulate you better in order to make more money?", "can we create a knowledge graph powerful enough to kill all our competition and influence democracy in our favor?" and "can we follow you everywhere to prey on you once we know enough to find a way in your life?"

Sometimes people just want to know which buttons users click because, yes, (gasp) it helps their business (the one that is employing people).

> I mean, you just stated that tons of people are ready to accept obnoxious interruptions in the form of ads that benefit corporations,

There aren't any fewer ads. We now have the same amount of ads + 3 privacy popups on every page you visit. I don't want any popups. EU regulation / the GDPR is clearly to blame for the popup. Supporters have to take responsibility for the internet experience they have wrought. Complaining about "bad actors" is an excuse. This is our reality today. It's because of these rules. Own it up.

In the vast majority of cases I reject analytics and telemetry not because I don't want the company knowing which buttons perform better, it's because I don't want some third-party scum like Google Analytics to know that.

Analytics can be done in a privacy-friendly way, but the vast majority of them aren't, and as a user there's no way to know whether that's the case, so the default "safe" option is to reject.

Also, it's not the GDPR that's to blame for the popups, it's the non-enforcement of it. GDPR explicitly outlaws annoying consent flows - here's the guidelines one of the regulators suggests, which 90% of implementations out there don't comply with: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio....

> Also, it's not the GDPR that's to blame for the popups, it's the non-enforcement of it.

A distinction without a difference. This is the result of the law. If you think this can be improved by better enforcement, maybe the EU should give this a try. But this comes in a package. You can't pass a law and then say, "sure we ruined the internet, but its just because the law is scary enough that companies add terrible popups, but not scary enough to make them actually compliant.

Also, to be clear, I personally don't care about dark patterns in those consent popups. I click whatever is the biggest button (like lots of people), the one that hopefully gets me the quickest to the content I want to see. The popup itself is the annoying thing. Because it appears on every. single. link you click.

96% percent of users opted out on iOS. Prompt engineering can only reduce that number so much.

> Which is why websites are not allowed to make their service conditioned on consent to tracking

Is that clear yet? Because most bigger newspapers in Germany do exactly that, try Spiegel.de

I wouldn't be surprised if German data protection agencies give news "publishers" more leeway given that they seem to be extremely influential in other domains of digital law in Germany.

But yeah, it's debatable whether "my business model depends on showing you ads from services that harvest your data via those ads" is a legitimate interest. If it is, that sets a bad precedent IMO.

FWIW, many of the data protection agencies are nowhere near as corrupt as other places. But those things tend to require court decisions.