The cookie policies and laws are broken. The ever-annoying cookie popups are breaking the internet in more ways than it fixes it. The choice to make each website show their own cookie selection screens is part of all this.
I am one of the few that (most of the time) actually takes the time to click "Reject all" whenever possible. Some websites are EXTREMELY shady when it comes to this though and hides their targeted advertisement and user-profile building into their "legitimate interests" section that IS NOT automatically turned off even if you "reject all". You have to manually go trough them and "object" to each and every one of them. Often no "object to all" button.
Imagine if sex used the same notion of "consent":
"Ok so you rejected having intercourse with me, but I have a 'legitimate interest' in fellatio that you didn't specifically say no to, so now you have to!". It is just terrible..
"Legitimate interest" is a broken term in those cookie forms. Legitimate to whom? Of course any company has a legitimate interest in making buckets of money.
Every browser should have a mandatory "cookie preferences" section where you can set your preferences for each of the typical use-cases for cookies.
Strictly functional cookies? OK. Targeted advertisement? NO. Tracking between websites? NO. Measure site performance? OK. etc.etc.
Whatever role the current cookie panes now fill, the browser should take over using some standard. The preferences could get sent directly over HTTP with the initial page-load and the server/site would have to comply or face extreme fines.
With the browser approach you could maintain your own allow/blocklist for site-specific settings. All this could be synchronized across your various devices.
Only then would we not be annoyed by those popups again.
It isn't the law that is broken, but rather the enforcement.
All the concerns you raise here are covered by the law. It's illegal for it to take longer to reject tracking than to allow it, which should ban all these web site that try to get you to scroll through several hundred options turning them all off. "Legitimate interest" means that the whatever data they want to process is a necessary step in order to do what the user has asked for - for instance, the web site has to be able to set a login token cookie when you log in, and that's allowed because you literally just asked to log in, and that's the only way the web site can do what you asked.
All these web site are illegally making the cookie experience dire. They are doing it so that they can:
1. Collect data from people who get fed up and click accept, people who accidentally click accept, etc.
2. Annoy everyone and make people think that the laws are broken, which increases the chances that the laws will be changed in the future.
Enforcement would help with this, but there's little sign of it happening.
There's various attempts to enforce the law, the problem is the legal system is pretty slow and it also relies on other websites actually conforming when the law is clarified by another being fined, and they really do not want to.
I would argue no, because the problem can be fixed without changing the laws, and I'm not convinced that it can be fixed by just changing the laws. People doing things that are illegal doesn't get fixed by making another law against it. So no, I don't think it means that in practice it is the same thing.
I am one of the few that (most of the time) actually takes the time to click "Reject all" whenever possible. Some websites are EXTREMELY shady when it comes to this though and hides their targeted advertisement and user-profile building into their "legitimate interests" section that IS NOT automatically turned off even if you "reject all". You have to manually go trough them and "object" to each and every one of them. Often no "object to all" button.
Imagine if sex used the same notion of "consent": "Ok so you rejected having intercourse with me, but I have a 'legitimate interest' in fellatio that you didn't specifically say no to, so now you have to!". It is just terrible..
"Legitimate interest" is a broken term in those cookie forms. Legitimate to whom? Of course any company has a legitimate interest in making buckets of money.
Every browser should have a mandatory "cookie preferences" section where you can set your preferences for each of the typical use-cases for cookies. Strictly functional cookies? OK. Targeted advertisement? NO. Tracking between websites? NO. Measure site performance? OK. etc.etc.
Whatever role the current cookie panes now fill, the browser should take over using some standard. The preferences could get sent directly over HTTP with the initial page-load and the server/site would have to comply or face extreme fines.
With the browser approach you could maintain your own allow/blocklist for site-specific settings. All this could be synchronized across your various devices.
Only then would we not be annoyed by those popups again.