Completely agree, every website I visit now has an annoying cookie overlay, which requires interaction from the user. Just let me read the damn article! I don't care if you track a single visit to this website which I will never come back to.
I can protect my privacy myself if I want to, the EU is not helping at all because there are just dark patterns everywhere to make not accepting cookies difficult or inconvenient.
The thing about these cookies and the privacy is that those cookies are accessible by everyone. And some websites can place cross site cookies and continue tracking you in detail just because you clicked that one link on that one website.
One reason the EU did this is to bring to light the tracking habits of websites and give some power to the user. Much like Apple did with their do not track me button on IPhone. A lot of people opted to not be tracked but before just didn’t have the option or were oblivious to being tracked to begin with. And trust me being as secretive as possible for tracking is by design. It’s scary the amount of info a website can get from your browser.
"This law should fail because people who want this law to fail are complying maliciously" is one of the more out-there readings of reality I have seen in some time.
Perhaps, rather than shrugging one's shoulders and saying "well, to hell with you, I've got mine," there are other things we as a functioning society can do. Like standardize how these cookie prompts must be displayed (small, inobtrusive) and standardize a set of accepted behaviors when the user ignores or closes it (reject all non-required).
People can be complying maliciously and the law can be bad at the same time. I doubt most people actually thinks the EU struck a good balancing with the current laws.
They don't just track "a single visit", they bind your surfing of this particular site to your global shadow-profile at FB or Google and then sell this data about you to companies purchasing ads (or worse). This kind of data collection of the general public is what the EU's GDPR is designed to protect, and which is why you need to ask consent from your users to track their desires like that and sell their data.
I can protect my privacy myself if I want to, the EU is not helping at all because there are just dark patterns everywhere to make not accepting cookies difficult or inconvenient.