You almost certainly encounter cookie banners all the time. They’re the kind of low-level annoyance that just seems to come with being a person on the internet: a pop-up asking you to agree to share some kind of information, with someone, for some purpose. You could find out more, but you don’t. No one does. You just click “Accept” and move on.

Are these banners sort of annoying, or are they something more? On this episode of The Vergecast, Kate Klonick, a professor at St. Johns and a senior editor at Lawfare, makes the case that cookie banners are a much bigger problem than you realize. She recently published a paper arguing that while there may have been good intentions behind cookie banners, they’ve become bloated and useless — and in the process, they’ve created a new kind of interaction that means trouble all over the web. The only solution is to get rid of them, and do it now.

After that, The Verge’s Allison Johnson takes us on a Gemini-fueled journey through Seattle. With the new Ask Maps feature, Google Maps uses AI models to answer deeper, more complex questions about the world around you, and Allison put the new tool to the test. It went surprisingly well! But it does bring up lots of questions about what information we’re willing to share, and how much we want our computers to know about us.

Finally, Allison sticks around to help us answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected]!) about E Ink smartphones, and whether simpler displays could be the answer to our smartphone problems. We have some ideas, and some reservations.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started: