Exactly, I block all cookies (except for a whitelist of sites I need to log into) and that ironically prevents the fucking popups from tracking that they have been clicked away or agreed to.

I use uBlock origin and various CSS injection to get rid of the popups but they don't catch every single one of them.

I wish the US would institute law making unsolicited (i.e. not triggered by a user click, like clicking on "Login") popups illegal, arrest the CEOs of companies that violate this, put them in a CEO jail for a week, make them wear an "I suck" T-shirt and dunce cap, and live stream their faces the entire time.

>arrest the CEOs of companies that violate this, put them in a CEO jail for a week, and live stream their faces the entire time.

I was with you until this point. Then it just turned into vengeance porn.

You are blocking a legitimate use of the web platform.

It is as if you set a dns to the other side of the globe, disabled browser cache and then complained that pages now take longer to load.

Tracking is bad, scary, and with worring consequences in how much ML can predict statical human behaviour, but the solution is not "cookies bad" or "ads bad".

If a website as any kind of first-onboarding interaction (be it a video, some marketing crap, asking for permissions, or whatever) and you disable _any_ form of tracking how are they supposed to know it is not your first visit?

Many of those website do not need to track you, many do so with malicious intent, but the concept of the consent modal itself serves a useful purpose

> I'm mostly pro-EU but the cookie thing is just a display of unbelievable incompetence.

this is an example of you knowing the area they're legislating in better than they do

they're just as bad in pretty much every other area too

What do you want them to do about that? The vast majority of those popups are already illegal according to GDPR. More legislation wouldn't fix that, I think.