Actually, the whole story is a joke.

And it works like this: A citizen strolls through a shopping center, enters a shop.

There he is immediately harassed with questions by the security staff and asked for signatures.

"May we save your purchases in our cash register?" "Do you agree to the camera surveillance?" "May we greet you by name next time?"

Justus Bender

Editor in politics of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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In real life the citizen would laugh. He would ask where the hidden camera was. He would wave off, leave the store and go to another. Only when security guards rushed up to him there and asked for signatures would it be no fun anymore. Then all of life would be a single Internet at once.

For more than a year, the citizens there have been bullied with high warning signs blocking their way. They should provide information on whether you consent to cookies. Otherwise you won't get any further. Cookies are not cookies, but waypoints with which websites determine that the user who has just bought a pair of jogging shoes on Amazon is the same one who is now watching a video about marathons on Youtube, and therefore the ideal candidate for a small advertising film via the latest running app, which is then shown to him on Facebook half an hour later. Whoever agrees to all cookies can assume that at some point many advertising companies will know them better than they do themselves. There are studies that showthat Facebook can predict the personality traits of a person with a few hundred clicks better than the next of kin. Every consent to cookies feeds the cookie monster, the data octopus who at some point knows that the man who likes jogging, also works at a well-known bank, watches porn on the side, cheats on his wife with his jogging partner and at an online pharmacy after 11 p.m. yesterday Was looking for remedies for foot warts. Everyone has secrets.Cheating on his wife with his jogging partner and looking for a remedy for foot warts at an online pharmacy yesterday after 11 p.m. Everyone has secrets.Cheating on his wife with his jogging partner and looking for a remedy for foot warts at an online pharmacy yesterday after 11 p.m. Everyone has secrets.

The thousandth click of the mouse is the most painful

So the idea is to slow down the data collection frenzy of the corporations, for example by having to ask for permission.

This was part of the EU's data protection guideline from 2009, but was ignored in Germany until the consumer advice center sued the Federal Court of Justice, which ruled in summer 2020 that the sites had to inquire everywhere.

Since then, visitors to a website have had to do the paperwork first.

It is a petitesse based on the principle of Chinese water torture.

The thousandth click of the mouse is the most painful.

There are often pros and cons in political questions, and those who argue seriously are wary of apodictic judgments.

This is not the case with this question.

Everyone thinks the condition as it is is bad.

Really everyone: parties, experts, site operators, data protectionists, consumer protectionists.

Nobody intended for it to be what it is.

Every single cookie query is a small monument to failure.

What should give citizens the opportunity to protect their data degenerates into the opposite in practice.

People only click away from the banners, polls show that.

There are even small programs that do this job.

They automate the surrender.