The European Union’s cookie consent requirements hinder consumer utility whilst allegedly protecting citizen privacy.
New analysis shows EU residents wasting nearly $100 billion clicking through consent popups since 2018. Yet the financial toll mounts as regulators across Europe work to address growing public frustration with online privacy measures.
Cookie Rules Cost More Than Digital Economy Gains
Numbers from Legiscope show Europeans spend over 575 million hours yearly on consent prompts. At an average hourly wage of €25, the economic cost reaches €14.375 billion annually – about 0.1% of EU GDP.
The lost productivity equals 287,500 full-time workers spending their entire year clicking through cookie banners. Because of this waste of human capital, many question current privacy measures.
Brussels Changes Course on Privacy Law
The European Commission withdrew its planned ePrivacy Regulation after eight years of negotiations. As a result, the 2002 ePrivacy Directive remains active, keeping current cookie banner rules in place.
The Commission cited two reasons: member states and Parliament could not agree, and the proposal no longer suited “the technological and legislative landscape.”
Swiss and UK Regulators Set New Rules
As Brussels revises its approach, other countries move forward.
For example, Switzerland’s Federal Data Protection Commissioner has created new guidelines requiring clear user consent for non-essential cookies. Under these rules, misleading design in consent boxes is banned, requiring clear options to reject tracking.
The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has begun checking cookie usage on its top 1,000 websites. Despite this initiative, previous checks found two-thirds of the top 200 websites broke the rules.
Google’s CAPTCHA Cookie Empire
A UC Irvine study has uncovered that Google earned nearly $1 trillion from CAPTCHA-related tracking cookies between 2010 and 2023. CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.
In their analysis, the researchers called the system "a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service."
Users worldwide spent 819 million hours solving CAPTCHAs during this period – equal to 1,182 human lifetimes. In light of this finding, many now examine web privacy tools and their purposes more closely.
What are Cookies?
Cookies are small text files that websites store on users’ devices. The name comes from “magic cookies,” a term for data packets that could be exchanged back and forth. It’s like fortune cookies passing messages between servers and users.
While basic cookies enable shopping carts and login systems, others track users across multiple sites for advertising.
Website operators must sort through rules that differ by country. Through this process, they weigh user needs against data protection laws.
EU Steps: Cookies
The end of the ePrivacy Regulation has angered many observers.
On this matter, Birgit Sippel, the European Parliament’s negotiator, said it wasted “a chance to create clear rules to protect communications privacy.”
Data protection expert Max Schrems sees value in starting over. Based on his expertise, he supports allowing anonymous statistics collection without consent while adding automatic consent exchange through browser settings which would reduce popup banners.
Keep up with Daily Euro Times for more updates!
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