> The EU is constantly trying to regulate US companies

US companies that operate in the EU market, handle EU citizens data. Obviously the EU regulations cover them. Do you think European companies don’t have to follow US regulations when offering their services in the US?

Every time I click a stupid cookie notice I wonder why the company serving it up chose to make me go through that rather than not track me.

As much as I hate the cookie banner, it is this requirement that forced companies to disclose the massive amounts of tracking they are using when anyone visits their site.

europeans certainly did make their politics everyone else's problem for centuries (we're talking every other continent at this point), but certainly the cookie banner is not even comparable, right?

> The EU is constantly trying to regulate US companies.

What, you mean if they want to do business in the EU, sell their products in the EU and process the data of EU citizens?

> Every time I click on a stupid cookie notice I fondly think of the EU.

That’s just scumbag malpractice on purpose.

Number one, such tracking consent should have been a web standard and set in the browser itself (like Do Not Track), not stupid per-site banners that are designed to get you to accept everything just to make them fuck off. We shouldn’t even need extensions etc. to get rid of them, it’s like the problem was solved at the wrong level and in the worst way possible.

Secondly, everyone responsible for the state of those banners should have been fined greatly. I only say fined because claiming that some people should be in jail over coercing millions of people to give up their data to trackers would apparently be unreasonable.

Cookie nonsense aside, the EU is mandating that AI companies watermark their output.

I'm curious if that (noticably) diminishes the quality of the output.

The stupid cookie notice is entirely the fault of the site you are visiting. The EU just made the site show you how it's fucking you.