"This Microsoft page you need to visit to download your file share your PII linked to your mandatory personal account to 728 partners ! We don't want you to know and certainly not to tell you, but the law forces us to"
You see that, and your problem is not "why do they need PII to let me do anything, nor "why are they giving my data to others", nor "why to SO MANY others", nor "why do they not want to tell me", no your problem is that they tell you. By describing the problem as "the law that force them" instead of "sharing so much with so many", you are saying of the two solutions available to fix that, you would prefer that they not tell you, instead of just not doing this mass sharing of PII anymore.
These banners are not what the law said had to happen. These banners are the mass sharing companies malicious compliance to get users to complain about the protection the law gives them instead of complaining about the original abuse that triggered it.
They're doing it this way because, as you show, it does work, people buy it and eat it.
It helps not to have built a business fully dependent on third party ads
Edit: related, perhaps also interesting to an international audience
Tweakers in the Netherlands recently announced a return of tracking cookies after switching to context-based advertising a few years ago. The reason given was that advertisers simply don't have tools to work with this, they'd need to implement custom software to both deploy banners to Tweakers specifically and then also to measure banners' effectiveness (like by appending ?utm_source=banner7271 to the URL). None of this is rocket science, but if you can publish on thousands of websites with one click and Tweakers requires talking to your software development team first... they were losing out. Ad-free subscriptions were and are available by the way, but people aren't buying them enough (not even the tenth part) to get rid of ads altogether. Github apparently does have that luxury
The European Commission’s own website uses cookie consent banners. It seems disingenuous to call every single cookie banner malicious compliance when even the EU’s own committees are so confused by the law that they feel they need to use one too. The law is poorly written.
And they're collecting data about you without your knowledge or consent, with no mechanism for you to discover they hold data about you, or a mechanism to insist they correct or remove it.
I hate the system as it is —the "do not track" header should mean something— but I'll take a disclaimer, an explanation of how they plan to use my data, and an opt-out over the Wild West.
They're catching up but it'll be a while. The Federal HIPAAGLBACOPPAFERPABBQ are all pretty toothless and even the golden child, California's CCPA is a series compromises that doesn't accomplish that much.
You go to a coffee shop. First time you mention you want ethiopian blend blah blah. Next morning the barista confirms you want ethiopian blend before you even mention it. The morning after that there's no talking needed on top of "Good morning".
Coffee supplier now tells the barista he should promote some coffee and he gets paid for doing it + sales percentage.
The barista next morning promotes some bags of ethiopian blend to you to increase the conversion rate.
Replace said barista with a website.
You did not consent to anything and I'm not aware of any laws related to this.
Yeah it's a 60Hz country, it affects perceived vehicle and pedestrian/animal movement too - everything's noticeably a bit smoother to the eye, it takes a while to get used to it.
The first time I went there I spent about half the day in the park tossing frisbees to dogs just to marvel at how smoothly everything seemed to move.
Not really a joke, more PTSD having worked in this space for a few years. "29.97" is what everyone calls it, but the value is exactly 30000/1001 which cannot be represented as a floating point number, so you have to use rational arithmetic when dealing with framerates and timestamps on video (if you care about accuracy), ... and don't get me started on drop-frames, oy!
I use Firefox, uBlock Origin and the annoyances filters. The internet feels just as smooth.
I visited the US and it took me a few months to stop receiving spam from businesses I interacted with. There were ads at the petrol pumps and in the bathrooms and basically everywhere else. There was little concept of consent wrt advertising and data collection, something I've come to take for granted.
It wasn't as bad as I make it, but it shows how our priorities might differ.
