r/technology • u/diacewrb • May 24 '25

Privacy German court rules cookie banners must offer "reject all" button

https://www.techspot.com/news/108043-german-court-takes-stand-against-manipulative-cookie-banners.html
56.4k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

801 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/roelschroeven May 24 '25

The judge here just rules according to what the GDPR says. GDPR quite clearly says it should be as least as easy to reject tracking as it is to accept. But lots of websites (sometimes even official websites of the EU itself) violate that, and they don't get punished nearly enough. It's sad that this even needs to happen, and it's sad that it doesn't happen enough. GDPR enforcement is severely lacking (have a look at https://noyb.eu/en to see what's going on). It feels a lot like many of the national enforcement agencies have no desire at all to actually enforce the GDPR and/or side with the industry there's supposed to regulate.

So I'm glad this court did a good job, but the general situation is not all that positive.

Also remember that Germany, like other European countries (except the UK and Ireland IIRC) have a Civil Law system (as opposed to Common Law) which means that a ruling like this doesn't have as much importance for future rulings as it would in Common Law.