Most of the cookie banners are breaking GDPR. The requirement under GDPR is that privacy must be the default and users can select to opt in. So most of the banners you come across that default to all tracking are against the law already. The legislation didn’t stop them being annoying in this way but a few prosecutions for the breaches and dark patterns would set things off on a better path.

Yeah I’ve been saying this to people. Don’t get mad at GDPR, get mad at companies who harvest your data

Banner? Why? What’d she do?

The other side of this is US websites that display “not available in your region” instead of the content.

I think this is companies making something annoying blaming it on EU privacy laws and then they thinking people will be against these laws in other countries because of the inconvenience.

Same strategy of companies doing things like putting “Contents may be hot.” on hot coffee and encouraging people to make fun of the McDonald’s Hot Coffee lawsuits. People think it was a joke when it was McDonald’s deciding to keep coffee extremely hot since it last longer, they saved so much money on coffee they could easily pay people off who got 2nd and 3rd degree burns because of the extremely hot coffee. But then one elderly women got severely burned in the groin area and the jury got so angry they awarded her a couple days worth of McDonald’s coffee profit. Don’t let companies do this type of thing!

It’s mostly correct what the article says but I’ll never really understand why you would quote some laws and not say which ones you’re quoting. The relevant parts here are not from GDPR but from the ePrivacy Directive 2002/58/EC, i.e. the more specialised law on what the EU calls electronic communications. And its Article 5, paragraph 3, which is about “information stored on the terminal equipment”, meant to include cookies without calling them such, was added to the law in 2009, 7 years before GDPR was adopted.