In the real world still, if a person says to you, "This is my partner", that basically means something like, "If you trust me, you can trust them" and/or "this person can speak on my behalf because they know me really well".

But online "partner" apparently now just means "a collection of companies whose names I could not even recount without looking them up in a database or spreadsheet I have somewhere".

I only share my economy with one person and my highest level of trust is with that same person. It's my wife. She is the one person in this world I would give the label "partner".

Apparently I am holding myself back. I need to collect a few more thousand partners.

Here is a fun thing. I work for Vivaldi Browser. Load any of our websites and you see no cookie banner and no mention of partners.

https://vivaldi.com

"But wait" you say, "didn't those terrible Europeans mandate the cookie banner!?"

No, no they did not. We do not need a cookie banner because we are not selling all your shit to every company under the sun.

Also those sites with cookie banners are just doing malicious compliance. This was never about the EU requiring cookie banners!

@ruari the bit the companies don't say is that EU requires informed consent to share your data.

Cookie banners are a deliberately poor implementation for collecting consent. And many of them are not compliant because they don't inform.