Why do we lose such a mass of time on cookies anyway

All the EU is addicted to cookies. Not the tasty ones but the legal ones. In my opinion it is a lot of nonsense wrapped in legal fortune telling. Or how legislation can have weird consequences :(

How many hours would all Europeans lose clicking away on cookies. What added value do you get in return for clicking on all those cookie banners? A quick calculation: The EU has about 400 million Internet users. Suppose these lose 10 seconds a day clicking on cookies by clicking OK. Then that's easily 400,000 hours, or 50,000 working days per year lost to clicking away. But 10 seconds is not correct. Some speak of a multiple, perhaps exaggerating them, but at least those cookies are not free!

Ah those 10 seconds I don't mind so much. What I find worse as an it-philosopher is the effect of this well-intentioned measure.

User

Almost everyone negligently clicks ok just so that annoying banner is gone. It always has something contractual when you visit a site. It interests very few people. After all, everywhere you go you get that same question over and over again. So it has now degenerated into a kind of mass ritual that you have to do every time you visit a Web site. However, this has perverse effects.

By being constantly alerted to the possibility of being followed, distrust grows and a user will look for new sites with less confidence. Maw it breaks a pleasant surfing experience. It's more of a contractual experience and it increases distrust.

Cookies break the "train of thought." After all, everywhere you go you always have to make a legal trade-off. Always you have to agree or disagree. This is not a healthy way to interact.

Cookies make you become numb. By clicking OK on everything you don't read what it is about. Or do you dear reader actually read all the terms and conditions that are on a website. I don't think so... But the consequence is that you no longer know at all what you are agreeing to. Thus those cookie banners far exceed their purpose.

Developer

But it also has a negative impact on the developers' side.
This both among small businesses and large companies. It creates legal uncertainty and reinforces distrust of the government. Suppose you create a Web site you have to deal with this legal divination. You need a privacy policy, you need terms and conditions text. You need to think when you create a contact form how long you keep data.

If you want to understand how people are using your site, you have to start asking, is it okay to install that plugin? Is that data anonymous etc....

In other words, that cookie banner throws up barriers. You then have to start taking special courses and consulting lawyers about whether you're OK. It has become a whole industry in itself. All because well meaning EU parliament legislates without properly assessing the consequences. It is a costly but mainly a cultural problem.

As a web development company ourselves, we use as much as possible Plausible for analytics and cookie-bot for the banner. This is an additional cost for both.

Solution

Instead of burdening everyone with cookie banners, perhaps it would be better to look at this from a different point of view. How about making a general setting mandatory in the browser, a sort of certificate that the user can set. The user could then set what small sites, what large companies, what advertising companies and perhaps the government are allowed to know about him.

This certificate could then be exchanged automatically when visiting a Web site. The EU can enforce the setting in a neutral default position that is balanced for everyone who wants nothing to do with it. But at least surfing will then become more fun and free again. The legislator can then also check more easily with large companies whether they are following the certificate by doing random checks (they could even automate this)

That seems to me a better solution than constantly clicking on agree.