You prefer the alternative, whomever owns the platform wins?
There is a spectrum between everyone votes on everything and yielding everything to our corporate overlords. For example there could be an "I don't care" button which picks one at random.
Cookie banners despite their annoyance are educating people and motivating corps to minimize their PII usage.
In terms of human hours used, it's possibly one of the more expensive education programs ever mandated by a government. And I haven't seen any evidence that it's actually moving corps to minimize their PII usage, since they don't pay the cost in time of having to read the banners.
Seems like it's either covert surveillance (before the EU cookie thing), or manipulated consent surveillance.
I personally improved my browsing experience with the Consent-o-matic addon, which knows some of these cookie modals, and fills them for me according to my preset (which is to deny all cookies).
Also, people not caring should not be a baseline. People are ignorant about the vast majority of things going on, and yet they are much better off if those are taken care of by people who actually give a damn - as evidenced by a good deal of regulations that keep lead out of paint, antibiotics out of chicken, and so on.
> People are ignorant about the vast majority of things going on, and yet they are much better off if those are taken care of by people who actually give a damn
No disagreement there, I just think the GDPR rules that led to ubiquitous cookie consent dialogs were indicative of policymaking by people who didn't fit that category. It should have been easy to predict this outcome from that policy.
