

The EU didn’t make anyone do that, site that have no business recoding the information put those up as a dark pattern to try and force people into accepting the terms so they can claim informed consent to the tracking. It’s malicious compliance, they could just not collect that tracking data that isn’t required to provide the service.

You are right, they were already doing that but the annoying popups aren’t because of the EU, the sites could just not set cookies to collect data they didn’t need to provide the service by default and not nag you constantly to let them have their way. It’s operation “wear them down” .