Big Consent wins again

The EU had a plan to fix cookie banners forever. A simple setting, in your browser, like setting your language. To be set once and have every website respect it automatically (with per-site control if needed). No more clicking through walls of options, no more “legitimate interest”, and no more “we care about your privacy”…

The council killed it this week. Or rather, Germany, France and Poland killed it. Google had been lobbying them hard, and it worked.

Interestingly, the ad-tech industry spent years blaming the bureaucrats in Brussels for them, but now they’re lobbying to keep them.

They built the banner dystopia filled with dark patterns and called it “consent”. Now they want to keep it and make sure you can’t just say no once and be done with it.

Surprising? Not really. Studies consistently show that only 3 to 10% of people actually don’t mind being tracked. Every “I agree” out there is from fatigue or misleading interfaces. With a clear dark-pattern-free way to opt-out, the tracking economy collapses.

So the banners stay, because the surveillance industry needs them, not because they help.

Which brings us back to your website. Every consent banner is an admission: someone is being tracked. Regulation won’t be fixing that anytime soon, as today’s news plainly shows.

But, you don’t need regulation to stop tracking your visitors. You just need to … stop tracking your visitors.

Your visitors stop being annoyed. They stop filing you in the “do not trust” box, and you stop feeding their data into a surveillance network every time they click on your site.

The industry fought hard this week to make sure the banner stays. That should tell everything you need to know whose interests that banner serves.

Colin