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I think that the idea that the EU might have had behind the cookie popup mandate wasn't to actually provide any useful information or options on a per-site basis, but to make users more aware of the amount of tracking occurring.
On an individual website standpoint, I agree with you -- the cookie popup law is obnoxious, and does a poor job of solving a technical problem that is better solved by just not retaining cookies. In fact, not retaining cookies -- a better approach, since I don't have to worry about whether the website is actually doing what it's saying -- exacerbates the cookie popups, because it ensures that a site cannot track you to remember whether it has already shown the cookie popup, so makes it do so all the time. Plus there were already long-existing technical options for a browser to automatically tell a website not to track the user, like P3P, that aren't disruptive from a UI standpoint. I'm just saying that I'm not sure that providing a user a way to avoid tracking on an individual website is actually the goal.
On a related note, though...generally-speaking, I don't care much about EU regulation insofar as it doesn't affect me. People in the EU can do what they want, and if they want to place restrictions that affect people in the EU, fine, whatever. I start to have a problem, though, when websites present cookie popups to me. I'm not in the EU. Now, in fairness, they do seem to have tamped down on that somewhat -- some European websites that used to show them to me seem to have stopped. But I still do get them from the occasional website.
tries a few
Like, thelocal.it is still doing it, for example. France24 doesn't appear to be, though, and I'm pretty sure they used to.
It was especially obnoxious for European websites that had some localization feature for everything but then had the cookie pop-up hardcoded to whatever was locally used of the eight million European languages out there. So the entire website would be presented in English to me except the one popup that you have to click through before seeing anything else, sometimes has extra buttons, and is in Dutch or something.
It isn't a cookie popup law, that's the advertising industry's spin on it. It's a law against taking personal data without consent and/or for illegitimate purposes (according to the lawmakers). You don't need a popup for essential cookies.
It is absolutely a cookie popup law, because you have to ask permission to use them for anything nonessential, like tracking, which pretty much everyone does.
But again, I don't care as long as it's only people in the EU that have to put up with it. You vote for the people who put the legislation in place, and if you want to, you can just vote them out. If I want to legislatively address it, I have to push for laws that penalize companies that do it here, which is ridiculous.
They can stop tracking you, that way they don't have to ask anything… which is precisely what they don't want to do and why they complained so much about GDPR. Lucky for them only a handful of European countries give a crap about privacy and actually enforce it in any meaningful way.
uBlock origin has lists to remove a lot of the popups (and blocks most trackers), browsing the Web in 2024 without it is torture.
Probably not, but a lot of them do. Meanwhile, I'd already solved that problem in a more-effective way than Brussels had by not letting them retain cookies at all, so what Brussels accomplished was to make a bunch of cookie popups get thrown in my face and require me to disable my more-effective solution if I don't want to click through them all the time.
I'm using uBlock too. This is what makes it through.
EDIT: Not to mention that even the EU's own website didn't stop using tracking cookies. Even they just started throwing up the dialog. And I just checked, and they're still doing that in 2024 and still showing it to me, though I'm not in the EU.
https://european-union.europa.eu/