It’s an inconvenience to people who care about privacy and use browser configurations that don’t store state between visits.
So now in an attempt to protect regular users, the law ended up hurting users that already cared.
Additionally, the shadiest and incompetent sites still just track people with no cookie banner. So the law doesn’t really provide protection against uncooperative parties, whereas privacy technology does.
Fair point about the banners mostly "hurting" users who care about privacy (but, really though- how much does it really "hurt" you? I'm "hurt" more by the fact that I have to fold laundry several days a week).
But, I take major issue with you saying that the LAW ended up hurting users. Companies are under no legal obligation to make those banners as obnoxious as they are or with so many dark patterns (I sometimes don't know if I'm even enabling or disabling tracking with the way they word it). That's squarely on the web site owners pulling that nonsense.
> Additionally, the shadiest and incompetent sites still just track people with no cookie banner. So the law doesn’t really provide protection against uncooperative parties, whereas privacy technology does.
I agree that the only/best way to protect yourself is via technology and not by relying on people obeying the law.
However, if this is also an argument against having the law, it's an incredibly weak one. You can apply that logic to argue that NO laws are effective. People still murder even though it's illegal- must be a bad law, no?
Actually every single lawyer we asked about implementing GDPR advised us to have one of those obnoxious banners. Because the law is so ambiguous and the penalties so high that is better to play it safe. And we have no ads nor tracking at all on our product website.
You can ignore your lawyer's advice if you want, but it's a bit like a lawyer office ignoring my data security and backup advice: assuming a huge amount of risk.
Frankly, I doubt the veracity of this anecdote. But even so, I'm willing to bet that the lawyers in this story did not tell you that the banners have to cover half the screen and have ambiguous wording to intentionally confuse visitors to your site. When I say "obnoxious banner" I'm not being redundant: not all banners or popovers are "obnoxious".
Or are you in the peanut gallery willing to believe that there is some conspiracy where all websites have suddenly decided to obliterate their user's UX when GDPR appeared just because they are evil?
I live in the EU and I can tell you: ALL banners/popups are obnoxious. They ALL get in my way when I want to do something entirely different. As a (non ad/user-tracking) business I would never afflict them on my users if I had a choice.
The productivity loss here in EU since the GDPR would be staggering - if there was much productivity to begin with, of course.