So How Cookie Banners Backfired

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From Washington to Brussels, policy folks are focused on digital privacy. Just this week, three states and the District of Columbia filed a series of lawsuits against Google, accusing it of violating consumers’ privacy rights. Dozens of bills have been introduced in Congress to force companies to develop digital tools that help users manage their privacy. And companies spend billions of dollars to comply with — or skirt — the labyrinth of complex privacy laws that already exist.

It just so happens that this week is known as Data Privacy Week.

But there’s an inconvenient truth about all the effort that has gone into creating and enforcing digital privacy safeguards: When it comes to the most extensive internet privacy rule yet, the public doesn’t seem to care — or, more accurately, it doesn’t seem to have the knowledge or tools to effectively benefit.

Four years ago, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation went into effect. It requires any website that is accessible in Europe, which means most websites, to post a notice of its privacy policy and to give people an opportunity to accept or reject cookies, the files that allow their data to be collected. When it passed, many digital privacy activists thought that digital privacy was on its way to being solved.

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That’s not how things turned out. The last time a pop-up window appeared on a website and asked whether you would allow cookies to gobble up your personal data, did you actually read the fine print or think for more than five seconds before you pressed “accept?” Me neither.

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