> so they implemented what they thought was the intention of the law
No, they didn't. They implemented something that they thought allows them to continue with the practices that the law was specifically designed to combat.
The user has very little motivation to accept tracking. The web site has a lot of motivation to track the user (because personalized ads = more money).
Thus, web sites make saying no as difficult as possible, while making saying yes as easy as possible.
A 100% compliant, user-friendly implementation would be showing non-personalized ads, then occasionally replacing one of those ads with a banner "want to receive ads that are actually relevant? click here to enable personalized ads" (which would lead to an informed consent dialog and set a cookie that would then apply to all web sites that use that ad provider).
But pop-ups coercing the user to consent are more profitable.
This could be fixed by enforcing the actual law (punishing the companies that tried to weasel out of it and processed data without valid consent) so that trying to weasel out of it is no longer a valid strategy.
No, they didn't. They implemented something that they thought allows them to continue with the practices that the law was specifically designed to combat.
The user has very little motivation to accept tracking. The web site has a lot of motivation to track the user (because personalized ads = more money).
Thus, web sites make saying no as difficult as possible, while making saying yes as easy as possible.
A 100% compliant, user-friendly implementation would be showing non-personalized ads, then occasionally replacing one of those ads with a banner "want to receive ads that are actually relevant? click here to enable personalized ads" (which would lead to an informed consent dialog and set a cookie that would then apply to all web sites that use that ad provider).
But pop-ups coercing the user to consent are more profitable.
This could be fixed by enforcing the actual law (punishing the companies that tried to weasel out of it and processed data without valid consent) so that trying to weasel out of it is no longer a valid strategy.