The TOS thing has surely reached the point where it's simply not reasonable to expect people to read them. Put another way - how many people read every single terms of services / privacy policy / end user licence agreement they see in full? I would be shocked if it's more than one in a million. Depending on the services you use (and how frequently they update them) this could require dozens of hours of reading every single week (and many more hours of analysis to fully understand them if that's even possible without training).
Legislation asking (indirectly) that companies shove even more of these "Click here to read our cookie policy" type messages into everyone faces has only made the problem worse.
> Legislation asking (indirectly) that companies shove even more of these "Click here to read our cookie policy" type messages into everyone faces has only made the problem worse.
Disagree here. It's not gotten worse, it's gotten more visible. It's only ethical to ask people before tracking them, so any site should have done this already. This legislation forces businesses to act more honestly towards users in this regard.
Businesses impacted then take this and frame it in a manner of "we're very sorry that your government forces us to annoy you with this, but if you'd just sign here we'll be right out of your way..." and the vast majority of techies swallow it because it is, indeed, annoying to have to sign away privacy again and again.
It doesn't have to be this way. See the omission of a cookie wall on various sites that don't do anything that requires special consent.
Legislation asking (indirectly) that companies shove even more of these "Click here to read our cookie policy" type messages into everyone faces has only made the problem worse.