alt Hacker NewsA good example of how this can end up with negative outcomes is the cookie directive, which is how we ended up with cookie consent popovers on every website that does absolutely nothing to prevent tracking and has only amounted to making lives more frustrating in the EU and abroad.
It was a decade too late and written by people who were incredibly out of touch with the actual problem. The GDPR is a bit better, but it's still a far bigger nuisance for regular European citizens than the companies that still largely unhindered track and profile the same.
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So because sometimes a regulation misses the mark, governments should not try to regulate?
Bad argument, the solution is not to not regulate, it's to make a new law mandating companies to make cookies opt-in behind a menu that can't be a banner. And if this somehow backfires too, we go again. Giving up is not the solution to the privacy crisis.
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Cookie consent popovers were the deliberate decisions of company to create the worst possible compliance. A much simpler one could have been to stop tracking users especially when it is not their primary business.
Newer regulations also mandate that "reject all cookies" should be a one click action but surprisingly compliance is low. Once again, the enemy of the customer here is the company, not the eu regulation.