Most companies are throwing cookie alerts at you because they figure it’s better to be safe than sorry When the GDPR came into effect, companies all over the globe — not just in Europe — scrambled to comply and started to enact privacy changes for all of their users everywhere. That included the cookie pop-ups. “Everybody just decided to be better safe than sorry and throw up a banner — with everybody acknowledging it doesn’t accomplish a whole lot,” said Joseph Jerome, former policy counsel for the Privacy & Data Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a privacy-focused nonprofit.