Due to some EU laws, there has to be a "cookie consent" dialog on every website that uses cookies. I would estimate that more than 50% (probably too low) of these popups are cosmetic only and it doesn't actually matter if you click accept or reject.
You could set your browser to clear all cookies when you close it. That does mean you have to keep logging into sites every time you open the browser again, but with a password manager that's not really a problem.
gdpr is a different thing than the cookie law, refusing consent is a real thing that everyone in the industry spent a hell of a lot of time and effort implementing to the letter because the fines for companies are way too large for anyone to ignore
Most of these consent pop ups are designed to be insanely annoying to the point where you just click accept all on a long list of cookies for individual things and they are not even grouped
it's illegal, there should be a "continue without accepting" link everytime, and in the selection of choice, all non essential should be disabled, but yeah, there's still some website not playing the game correctly, hopefully UE will give sanction at some point?
It's sad that for some of the more obnoxious offenders where you need to individually opt out for each ad partner they carry it still may take the addon 30+ seconds. Imagine how long it would take to click everything manually. And that stuff is illegal by the way: rejecting everything must be just as easy as accepting everything. If I come across such a site I typically just avoid them from that point forward.
90% of the time^1 there's at least a Cancel or Reject button. Sometimes you even get to pick which categories right there without it being two or three levels deep.
1 based on my highly scientific method of pulling numbers outa mah butt
You usually first get an injunction with some time to fix the issue, little risk of immediate fines.
So there is little reason to implement a working consent dialog unless you get a legal notice to do so. When the law came out we got a lot of such notices over the lack of the dialog, but after a usless dialog was implemented, it stopped.
Guess lawyers aren't that tech savy or have better things to do.
Wasn't a good read for me. A boring intro and then some speculation about possible new laws in the future, and Google Topics API mayybe making cookies obsolete.