Last year, a UK-based nonprofit tax policy organization decided to protest a legal requirement that it had to have a posted privacy policy. Its director, Dan Neidle, wanted to make the point that no one reads these things so what was the point of even having one.
So, he launched his personal protest in February 2024 by inserting an offer of a free bottle of wine into his privacy policy:
*MOUSE PRINT:
It took three months before anyone noticed the free wine offer and claimed it.
After the wine was claimed, Neidle commented, “Every tiny coffee shop has to have a privacy policy on their website, it’s crazy. It’s money that’s being wasted.”
This is the ultimate collision of government and business and the inevitable end result of laws such as GDPR in the EU. Whether or not you support laws like that, this is the logical and inevitable result because there is no way to add enough nuance to a law to account for all the different use cases that a regular person might run into when it comes to how cookies are used on the internet.