No dark patterns, no Google nonsense … Wow, what a superpower
Alphabet’s Google on Thursday said it has rolled out a new cookie consent banner for YouTube visitors in France and will soon deploy the popup for its online properties throughout Europe. The reformulated cookie consent banner – more of screen-seizing overlay page than a slender banner – follows from discussions between the US goliath and European data protection authorities, particularly France’s Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), which has been grumbling about cookie compliance for at least the past seven years. Cookies, or HTTP Cookies, are files used to store key-value data sets in a web user’s browser for session management, personalization, and tracking. It’s the tracking aspect of cookies – particularly third-party cookies placed by entities other than the website being visited – that has made them problematic and has led lawmakers in the EU and elsewhere to regulate their usage. In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive impose consent requirements on websites using cookies. Efforts to comply with these laws – whether motivated by disingenuous efforts to steer users to accept all cookies or genuine design incompetence – have led to cookie consent popups that annoyed users and spurred the development of technology to avoid the intrusive notices, such as browser extensions that block them.
