You’ve probably already railed against those annoying cookie banners that pop up every time you visit a website. I even have one like that and the only ones who like it are GDPR Otakus.
Well, imagine that this is not just a temporary annoyance imposed on European Internet users. Nay!! It has completely become a monumental chasm in productivity on a European scale ! An absolutely fascinating study has just revealed figures that are dizzying: Europeans of which you are probably one are collectively passing 575 million hours per year to click on these invasive pop-ups. To give you an idea of the scale of the phenomenon, that’s the equivalent of 287,500 people who would spend their entire working day doing ONLY that.
Band of unemployed serving the GDPR, go!
But where does this sweet madness come from?
Well, it all started in 2002 with a well-intentioned European privacy directive. At the time, cookies were just starting to make headlines and regulators, keen to protect citizens from potential mass surveillance, required consent to be obtained before any information was stored on our devices. It was a nice idea, it must be said.
But twenty years later, the result is… let’s say… particular. The fault lies in poor “technical implementation” of the law. Sites display these banners mainly to protect themselves legally, when in fact, the vast majority of cookies are just used to analyze traffic or manage basic advertising.
Now, let’s do the math together (and hold on, it stings): on average, each European Internet user visits approximately 1200 new sites per year. On these sites, 85% display a cookie banner, which makes 1020 pop-ups / banners to manage. At a rate of 5 seconds per interaction (and again, this is optimistic), we manage to 1.42 hours per person per year. Multiply that by the 404 million internet users in Europe and… boom!
575 million hours gone up in smoke!
To transform this lost time into euros (because time is money, as someone else said), let’s take the average European hourly wage which is €25. The calculation is quick: 14.375 billion euros evaporated every year. It is therefore the equivalent of 0.10% of the GDP of the European Union. This is more than the annual budget of some countries!
The funny thing (or the saddest, it depends) is that this obligation does not even achieve its initial objective of protecting privacy because by seeing these banners pop up everywhere, users have developed this which we call the “consent fatigue”. Result, we mechanically click on “Accept everything” just to make the pop-up disappear, just like when you close your eyes by clicking “I have read the terms of use”. Personally, I’m there too.
So what to do?
Moving outside of Europe? Experts suggest instead exempting small and medium-sized businesses that use cookies on a basic basis. After all, most sites do not have the technical means (or the desire, for that matter) to track users intensively. This would already be a first step to lighten this digital burden. Even Google Analytics is not fully GDPR-compatible, so many of us have kicked it out.
The good news is that the European Commission is starting to become aware of the problem and discussions are underway to modernize these aging regulations. In the meantime, the next time you come across a cookie banner, tell yourself that you are participating in a great European tradition that costs more than the GDP of certain small states. WELL DONE !
And for those who wonder if these calculations are not a little exaggerated… Well, even taking conservative estimates, the order of magnitude remains impressive. So, by wanting to do too well, we often create side effects… expensive.
Thank you Fanzyride for sharing this study!
Study source
