People don't know whether they are or are not doing things that require consent under the law. That's because, if you haven't noticed, the people concerned are computer programmers, UI designers, and PMs. Notably missing from that list is "lawyers who can be bothered to research the question".
People put the banners up because they see other people doing it and it seems safest. That all of this would be so should have been perfectly obviously to whoever contemplated bringing the regulation into existence. Therefore they are either imperceptive or malign.
> if you haven't noticed, the people concerned are computer programmers, UI designers, and PMs.
Those are the people who should know best what is meant by "ask visitors for consent before you track them.".
Lawyers and more work is needed if you want to track anyway and look for ways to make people accidentally consent. "Let's ask the question, but hide the unwanted answer as deeply as possibly without breaking the law."
You may blame EU bureaucrats, I blame the unwillingness of the companies to fulfill the spirit of the law and putting all the work into pretending.
> People don't know whether they are or are not doing things that require consent under the law.
This knowledge is taught in school and we also had one lecture in university and I am not even studying CS or anything computer adjacent. You can very much rely on CS graduates to know this, and even if they don't, the company could organize a training day, like they do for all the other stuff. This is really a dumb excuse for a company.
Is that what really happens though? EU countries usually don't immediately punish violations unless they're particularly egregious. You're more likely to get a warning and a grace period to meet the requirements. So the rational approach would be to not bother with consent banners, GDPR and whatnot until you attract the attention of the regulators, at which point you should definitely hire a legal team that can tell you what exactly you need to do to comply.
Any company that can hire teams of software developers can afford to hire a lawyer to tell them whether they need to irritate all their customers. And frankly, they'd be dumb not to hire a lawyer if they think they need some legal cover to determine whether that cover is sufficient.
Good god. I certainly wasn't suggesting this situation would be improved by software teams hiring lawyers to advise on their software! You appear to have completely lost perspective.
You think a company worried that they have a legal issue should just ask the programmers and ui designers to sort it out? Or that programmers who think the company has a legal issue should take it upon themselves to come up with a feature that they think addresses it without consulting legal?
