this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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They’re not lazy, they’re maliciously compliant. The sites know how to comply with GDPR, but wanted to throw a fit instead. So they came up with the annoying cookie banners, to make users hate GDPR instead of hating the sites that were stealing and selling all of their data. And the worst part is that it worked. Many people wholly equate GDPR with the cookie banners, instead of the massive leap in privacy rights that it represented when it was passed.
Often times they're not even compliant.
It's a lot easier to dislike GDPR when you don't live in a country that benefits from it, but it still annoys you.
GDPR doesn't annoy anyone. The incompetent developers who made the banners do. There is absolutely no need for them.
no one benefits from it (at least from the part regarding cookies, which i am honestly not sure is part of gdpr)
before that, you just dealt with cookies with whatever cookie extension you preferred. now you would have to trust the site to store your rejection in a cookie, because guess what happens next time you visit the site when it doesn't find any cookie.
and these fucking dialogs are hard to get rid off even with ublock origin.
so it is definitely the case of road to hell paved with good intentions.
You're wrong but do try out Ghostery, a FF plugin that rids you of the popups.
Excellent points, but the cookie banners were a response to the ePrivacy Directive, not GDPR. In fact the banners predate GDPR by about a decade! I know this because I decided to make my own banner that was slightly less annoying about five years before GDPR was a thing.
Funnily enough most of your points are still correct precisely because, as you say, "most people wholly equate GDPR with the cookie banners".
I don't remember seeing any banners before GDPR?
This is not correct. Since gdpr isn't required in most of the world, they don't want to comply. It's not about making users hate them. It's about collecting data, and simply complying with gdpr where they have to, and only where they have to.
Making users hate GDPR and revolting against it is a means to that end though, of collecting data.