Nobody Asked for the Cookie Banner: The Mistake We Can’t Afford with AI

Last month our founder, Sandra Gonzalez, delivered a thought-provoking keynote at The Barbican for The Flux Convergence conference. She is bringing the extended version this talk to the UX for Change community.

Curious about the title? Here is the the premise. No law has ever required a cookie banner. The rules asked for informed consent and left the interface to us, and what our design profession built, collectively, is the most disliked pattern on the web. This talk is about what happened and why it can be happening again right now, as the EU AI Act starts to be rolled out. Last time the worst case scenario was a better-targeted advert. This time the stakes are much higher. Sandra will walk you through six real, documented cases and show how each one maps to a law built to prevent these type of cases to happen again, and which of those protections are already in force and which won’t arrive until 2027 or later.

This won’t be a lecture you sit through politely. It’s a provocation our founder invites the community to wrestle with, because the UX community is well positioned to be at the forefront of not making the same mistakes.

Come for the talk. Stay for the conversation.