If you visit a website in Europe, chances are you’ve immediately come across a cookie consent banner. This type of element has become a constant in our web browsing sessions, and now a study reveals an estimate of the immense amount of time we waste with them.
Remembering what cookies are. Cookies allow websites to remember information about you that later improves the user experience. For example, that the website is displayed in your language, that it is verified that you are a human being or a bot and, of course, that the advertising campaigns on that website are more or less effective. That poses privacy risks, and European regulators wanted to protect us from that threat.
The GDPR and the explosion of cookie consent banners. In 2002 the European Union launched a directive on the privacy of electronic communications. These regulations required user consent for the use of cookies, and the requirement was consolidated in May 2018 with the activation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union.
Good intentions, terrible implementation. For a website to notify us of what data it is collecting with cookies and for what purpose it is doing so is a priori a good idea. It is also true that our consent is necessary to collect and use them, without a doubt. The problem is that this process has ended up forcing the implementation of intrusive and very annoying cookie consent banners that significantly harm the user experience.
Even the EU knew that warnings are terrible. Even before requiring consent, notices that a page used cookies were already beginning to be annoying and the EU knew it. Although it was proposed to reduce and even eliminate them, the aforementioned GDPR made everything worse in terms of the user experience. The EU again recognized that the initial implementation was not ideal and proposed some improvements in 2020. They did not help much.
And they continue to recognize that they are annoying. At the beginning of the year, EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders indicated in an interview that the European Commission knows how annoying these banners are. Reynders raised regulators’ intention to mitigate the problem, but there has been no word since then on those potential measures.
575 million hours lost. At Legiscope they estimated the time that Europeans waste with these cookie consent banners and came to the conclusion that in total, the almost 450 million citizens lose about 575 million hours a year. According to these calculations, each Internet user spends 1.42 hours a year interacting with these banners.
Are banners useful? An article in The New York Times cited several experts who concluded that these banners were a “nearly futile exercise” and that “virtually no one reads” these ads. In fact, two communication professors, Nora Draper and Josepth Turow, indicated in a 2019 study that a “digital surrender” was occurring. That is: a state of mind in which users know perfectly well that someone is appropriating their data and monetizing it, but they feel like they can’t do anything. They resign themselves to allowing it because for them it is the unfortunate Price of being a citizen of the network of networks.
Imagen | Headway
In WorldOfSoftware | The PSOE has ultra-personalized advertising software that differentiates between “gamers” and “bikers.” The AEPD doesn’t care
