Interesting off topic subject. But I do not have a link to the times story in this email.
I appreciate my online Times subscription and recommend the same for you.
NYT Deal Book emails
How cookie banners backfired
Author Headshot
By Joe Nocera
“No one reads cookie banners,” said Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy advocate who played a key role in pushing for the regulation. “They’ve become almost a useless exercise.”
Actually, it is worse. In practice, the proliferation of cookie banners has both numbed people to their purpose and given companies yet another way to manipulate users.
Companies have turned cookie banners into a tool that does the opposite of what regulators intended. You’ve heard of “search engine optimization”? There are now firms, called consent management platforms, that are promising “consent rate optimization”— meaning they create cookie banners that will move people to hit the “accept” button. One simple example: According to one study, removing the “opt out” button on the front page of the cookie banner increases consent by 22 or 23 percentage points. Some of these companies say they can achieve a consent rate of 90 percent.