> Companies are under no legal obligation to make those banners as obnoxious as they are
Actually every single lawyer we asked about implementing GDPR advised us to have one of those obnoxious banners. Because the law is so ambiguous and the penalties so high that is better to play it safe. And we have no ads nor tracking at all on our product website.
You can ignore your lawyer's advice if you want, but it's a bit like a lawyer office ignoring my data security and backup advice: assuming a huge amount of risk.
If you are using cookies for user preferences/settings, then they require consent. If you are only using cookies for session information (like a shopping cart), then you don't have to get consent. Your lawyers know this.
Frankly, I doubt the veracity of this anecdote. But even so, I'm willing to bet that the lawyers in this story did not tell you that the banners have to cover half the screen and have ambiguous wording to intentionally confuse visitors to your site. When I say "obnoxious banner" I'm not being redundant: not all banners or popovers are "obnoxious".
Are you a lawyer? Are you willing to assume the liability I may incur if I follow your advice? Or are you at least a business owner/manager who's had to deal with this crap?
Or are you in the peanut gallery willing to believe that there is some conspiracy where all websites have suddenly decided to obliterate their user's UX when GDPR appeared just because they are evil?
I live in the EU and I can tell you: ALL banners/popups are obnoxious. They ALL get in my way when I want to do something entirely different. As a (non ad/user-tracking) business I would never afflict them on my users if I had a choice.
The productivity loss here in EU since the GDPR would be staggering - if there was much productivity to begin with, of course.
Actually every single lawyer we asked about implementing GDPR advised us to have one of those obnoxious banners. Because the law is so ambiguous and the penalties so high that is better to play it safe. And we have no ads nor tracking at all on our product website.
You can ignore your lawyer's advice if you want, but it's a bit like a lawyer office ignoring my data security and backup advice: assuming a huge amount of risk.