The other approach to killing the cookie banner is simply to declare that such a thing cannot constitute “informed consent”. (Perhaps: “ticking a checkbox and/or clicking a button cannot constitute informed consent”; and see what they try next.) From a factual perspective, I honestly think that shouldn’t be controversial: it’s well-understood that very few people actually read those things, they just want to get them out of the way. Just as shrink-wrap licenses and even simple contracts have at times in some jurisdictions essentially been neutered, so that only terms that a reasonable person would expect to be there are enforceable, at which point it becomes obvious that the whole thing needs tearing down in favour of standard licenses/contracts. In the Australian state Victoria, for example, there are standard rent and property sale contracts; for renting you must use that contract <https://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/housing/renting/starting-and...>, and I got the impression that residential sales practically always use the standard contract.
But of course it’s impossible to convince someone of something when their livelihood depends on their not understanding it.
Cookie control always should have been a browser control. The legal route always should have been to force it to be built into browsers that provide sane defaults, and make it illegal to circumvent what the browser declares as far as fingerprinting etc.
any sort of elevation prompt, IF I allow them to be popups or an icon in a toolbar, should always be in the same place and not cover the page.
> From a factual perspective, I honestly think that shouldn’t be controversial: it’s well-understood that very few people actually read those things, they just want to get them out of the way
There’s no way this would fly. “I didn’t read it” can’t possibly be an excuse to avoid being bound by an agreement. Every party to an agreement that flaunted its terms, even though they took advantage of the benefits granted by it, would invoke it as a defense, and it’s irrefutable. The system would completely fall apart if this happened.
There’s a balance that needs to be carefully managed here. Yes, fairness to consumers is important. But you can’t destroy the incentive to produce value in so doing.
> “I didn’t read it” can’t possibly be an excuse to avoid being bound by an agreement
Only engineers have trouble understanding this. It can be a reasonable defense, and it has successfully been used in courts of law many times. The law is not a machine that compiles text like code literally. Imagine someone who coerces a dying or sick person to sign an agreement they couldn’t possibly be in a reasonable state of mind to understand what they were doing -- the law can and does invalidate such “contracts”. That is the same principle behind age of consent laws. The law could theorerically (and does) invalidate “agreements” which no one is reasonably expected to read and understand.
I am an attorney, and am aware of certain exceptions. But these are exceptions and not the general rule, which is what I am speaking of.
> The law could theorerically (and does) invalidate “agreements” which no one is reasonably expected to read and understand.
I haven’t heard of a single case where an agreement was voided because “no one could reasonably be expected to understand it.” Unless the language was so impenetrable or vague that the agreement itself could not be discerned. Lawyers tend not to write such agreements.
It can and has been in many cases in many legal systems. For example, let’s say you walk into my store to buy a dish washer. I say ”here is an extended warranty that I will give you. Just sign” you sign it instead of reading 15 pages of boilerplate. In the end of the document it says you now owe me 10 billion dollars. Doubt I will be able to enforce it in most legal systems.
That’s not an “I didn’t read it” defense. That’s a “term is this contract is unconscionable” defense. They’re not the same thing. I was speaking strictly of the former.
Also, striking an unconscionable term typically does not void the whole contract. Just the term in question.
Of you need a nonstandard contract then you need to provide proof that it was understood. These are not provided in a context where I would expect anyone reading it to have a lawyer to advise so they obviously don't understand it
> There’s a balance that needs to be carefully managed here. Yes, fairness to consumers is important. But you can’t destroy the incentive to produce value in so doing.
The value is derived from the people consuming the product. Placing the "incentive to produce value" above the people who presumably are the source of this value seems...misaligned.
If there’s no product or service to be consumed, there’s no value produced either. That’s the point: it’s harmful to eliminate the incentive to produce.
People will _always_ need things. There are very few things that will eliminate people's need for things and producers will of course adapt to the environment.
What we need is an environment that does not give the producers asymmetric power over consumers and the products will naturally align with that.
That argument has actually worked in some cases, especially when you need to click away to actually access the document. I assume it's why we see more and more examples where you need to scroll the full body of text in order to "agree".
Websites need cookies.
I don't get why I have to suffer through this for a few puritans who literally lose nothing in the process of this transaction but act as if Stasi is watching them.
Aggregated analytics do, and you can't run a serious website without some kind of analytics. Preference-storing does as well, despite any reasonable user expecting that, if they set a preference, it will be saved.
It's YOUR browser, a locally running software on a physical computer YOU own which memorize the cookie key-value pair a remote host told YOU to memorize and YOU return the same value later. It's YOU who allowed the cookie. If YOU don't want to allow the cookie, YOU simply not allow it.
You are technically 100% control on cookie. These JavaScript implemented in-page UI has no guarantee to respect your wish. But you have a power to disable it.
> Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner.
So lawmakers do know how to make legally binding preferences based on device settings? What a crazy innovation.. now if only parents were given these options to indicate their child is using a device.. we could do away with all this Online Safety Act nonsense...
Don't fall for the "we are just stupid" propaganda, which is used constantly by governments acting in bad faith.
Browsers already had settings for deleting cookies. There was never a reason for banners whose only function was pulling the ladder up from smaller competitors and concentrating power in the hands of an oligopoly that could siphon data directly from the OS.
This coupled with a law mandating ISPs provide a "change IP on demand" feature would have given users a sort of "Tor light" level of privacy. Strong privacy is trivial to achieve for a government that doesn't have a conflicting goal of total surveillance.
I think it's because every single website breaks if you don't allow cookies at the browser level. Some knowledge of what the specific cookie does was necessary.
The problem there is that parent's won't know how to do it, or won't care. Many can hardly operate the most user-friendly phone, let alone manage accounts.
The online safety acts and its EU counterparts are somewhat risky, but nobody wants the mention the only proper alternative: a total ban on "social media." Not just for kids, but for everyone. Or a ban on smart phones, that would work too, at least short term. But: money.
> The problem there is that parent's won't know how to do it, or won't care.
This is unfortunately the reality.
The other day a friend asked me to help her make her phone safer for her kids to use. I started by asking if she set permissions on the apps she downloaded. She looked at me blankly, "What permissions?". I proceeded to show her how you can granularly control what you allow each app to do on your phone and what access it is allowed. Her head blew up, she had no idea any of this existed and after gong through a few menus, she didn't care any more. It was all too complicated and too much to think about for a busy mum.
This is why governments unfortunately are having to try to protect people from themselves. As tech competent people it all seems so simple to us, but we need to remember the majority of the population just click 'Allow All' and blow past all permission and security questions as they have no idea what any of it means.
Yes, you can't make parents care, but make it easy for the ones who do, and you'll also pick up some number of those who care but only if it's not too difficult. There's no reason a parent should have to set permissions separately in 10 differents apps on a child's device.
That’s not true. Every TV app has a parent setting. That’s really easy to use browser support profiles just like TV apps do bad. UX doesn’t mean that it can’t be set up easily for parents. Windows itself could have profiles for kids that has all this set automatically. It’s not hard. There’s just no will to do it.
That's why the setting should be on the device, not the browser or individual apps. One setting that you could even get pre-configured when you buy the phone.
>>>>>>> now if only parents were given these options to indicate their child is using a device.. we could do away with all this Online Safety Act nonsense...
THIS
Holy shit. This is such an obvious fix. And it shuts up those surveillance state goons immediately.
My God, why have we tried to summon up the ghost of 1984 when such a simple fix as this will do.
Parents can lock devices into "child mode" that emits "user is child" headers. Websites can then block.
The blast radius is zero.
Good God, we need to fast track this into browsers right now. If we hurry we might be able to point to this as the technical fix.
Once some of the infrastructure exists, OS vendors can hook into it.
Firefox devs - please do this right now. Please spearhead this.
I might have to vibe code an advocacy site for the spec and set up a GitHub / RFC process.
I agree, and I agree with the enthusiasm on which you bring in.
I've long since considered that the efforts for online child safety should be pointed at educating parents and spearheading some kind of certification of compliance for child safety of software and websites.
[this product is certified to adhere to EU:CSA]
Then you can block everything not certified, and the software that does the blocking would also be certified, the two major prongs you need (endpoints and sites working together: else they're blocked). The rest of the money goes to education for parents about this fact, and the dangers of not doing it, and how to do it.
This is super "easy" (when comparing to the effort it would take for putting backdoors in everything).
Which is why I think that the reason is definitely not child safety, and more about crime control.
Sloppy, non-privacy-preserving "analytics" set up by some communications intern ≠ malice. They can mean well and still do a poor job. True privacy on the internet is notoriously hard.
> Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner. Unfortunately, the tracking industry is pushing back – and so far, they’ve been successful.
> ...
> You may think that EU privacy law requires cookie banners. But the law is clear: online tracking is prohibited by default.
Wow, finally. This would be a major quality of life update for browsing the web. As others have stated, not all sites merit the same preferences. Hopefully they can adapt a middleground of default settings with the ability to customize site by site.
under what circumstances as user would I want to explicitly agree to have my browsing history sent to tens or hundreds of third party tracking aggregators?
I don't disagree. The ideal state here is really layers of customation for the defaults. Options like reject all, or strictly necessary would be at the forefront. And then it's really up to the individual how they want to proceed when those options are not available.
Devil's advocate argument: if they were giving you something in return, and that could be cash, but it might also be "you can have this content for free".
In the UK a few news sites have changed cookie banners to "you can accept and see this stuff for free, or you can sign up for a subscription, which would you prefer?". It's the only time I hit accept (and then clear browser history).
If blanket preferences from browser signals became the norm, a segment might open up where you would configure preferences and a data broker would make sure you get something in return for your data. At minimum it might force paywalled publishers to consider that as a "lite" subscription option.
That's been ruled illegal in the EU, but EU sites still do it. Basically, the consent exception only applies if the user isn't coerced into it. Because coerced consent isn't consent.
You seem to have missed the point. No ads dont require those things, but companies could start offering content in return for those things instead of ads.
As I understand it, it is the position of several DPAs that denial of access entirely (i.e. "consent or pay") could contravene the "freely given" requirement of GDPR in most cases, though this has thus far not been tested in court.
I always wondered though why a website in the eu, for the love of their users, won't just drop cookie usage and instrusive third party scripts. Just do analytics on the backend and don't set any cookie, except for tokens in authenticated areas
You can't even save user preferences (like language or other settings) without showing a cookie banner. And for a serious website, front end analytics are kind of a necessity to understand how users interact with pages and improve the experience. Note that it certainly doesn't require tracking the behaviour of individual users, just understanding how controls are used in aggregate.
I know it seems like you could work around this with careful design and maybe focus groups and such, but I can tell you we regularly uncover surprising insights from (aggregate) trends in front-end events.
I think this would be a net benefit, but I can see an issue. A lot of news sites today do "accept tracking, or pay us, or you can't access the page". The orgs doing this are reputable-ish so I assume it's considered legal, on some level at least.
So now they'd have a new popup that says "reconfigure your browser to accept tracking, or pay us, or you can't access the page". Which isn't really an improvement.
> automated signals that would communicate your privacy preferences between your device and websites or apps0
Sounds good, as long as it covers the "legitimate interest" bollocks⁰ that is often hidden in inconvenient UI nests as well as the basic preference.
-------
[0] "we see your preference not to be stalked, but we want to anyway, click again for every partner to reconfirm you don't want them following you around"
Also there's a big difference between the sites that easily allow you to simply reject whatever their premade cookie settings are. And, the sites that only allow you to use them after you've accepted (example, politico.eu). Or, the sites that do have a 'reject' option, but you have to click through multiple screens and then manually reject each individual option.
Sites that easily allow you to simply reject everything are then a short hop, skip and a jump into browser settings where you auto-reject all cookie/tracking nonsense
Nice try but it won’t work, unless they were to also make it illegal to diversify the experience based on these settings and periodically but consistently issue massive fines to those who do (or who ignore such settings), which unfortunately ain’t happening.
An easier step forward could be to make the too often present ridiculous use of dark patterns and endless process to express your lack of consent illegal (and issue colossal fines…)
And guess who makes the most of devices and the most popular browser, I already see post install "Get most of the browsing experience by agreeing to these defaults."
I still don't get why every website has a cookie banner by default. I am data controller for several companies and have lots of exposure to GDPR. All my websites have no cookie banner, as they are not required.
I guess that most companies just chuck it up there as a default so they dont have to read the law, or maybe they are all actually harvesting and selling personal data and therefore require cookies? Who knows.
Don't underestimate the argument of "just to be on the safe side". Someone running a business who doesn't know a lot about cookies will often just put a banner on as an easy arse covering mechanism even when not required.
> I guess that most companies just chuck it up there as a default so they dont have to read the law
I think most companies just don't give a fuck about user privacy and therefor have to show one. There are of course exceptions. But I don't know how many of them have been actual (for-profit) companies.
If you use social media pixels, ad tracking, or performance analytics tools like Google Analytics a cookie banner and consent is required. If not, then not.
Side note: there’s plenty of Analytics tools that don’t require cookies. Plausible (https://plausible.io) is one of them, there are many others.
Not affiliated, just a happy customer.
> I guess that most companies just chuck it up there as a default so they dont have to read the law, or maybe they are all actually harvesting and selling personal data and therefore require cookies?
That has been my guess as well. If you run npm install half-the-internet you have no idea what's in there, so just slap on that cookie banner for good measure. Of course the real problem is not knowing what's inside your application, but the thought process is "eh, if a blanket cookie banner does the job then that's good enough for me".
I’ve made a few sites for work that aren’t our primary focus. The sites used cookies for login and for “required purposes” (storing in progress state). We did all the tracking on the backend, no cookies or client side trackers.
On our go-live form there’s a question “do you use cookies” and it’s yes/no. If you say yes legal block the site from going live without the pre approved cookie banner…
Sounds like your legal department is broken. You should fix that.
I mean that both in the sense of "you, plural" (your company should fix that) and "you, personally" (because diffusion of responsibility is a real issue, and someone needs to actually do it).
I am old enough to remember Do Not Track and its failure and problems associated with it. What's new here? Why wasn't it adopted in the first place for GDPR?
Even if you communicated your preferences sites would still want to ask for an exception to them. At least you won't see them ask for consent if you preapprove it.
The insanity around cookie banners is a good target.
> Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner.
Fortunately, if you have uBlock Origin, you can enable Easylist cookie notices under annoyances and avoid most of them. Combine with blocking third-party cookies, and the problem pretty much disappears.
The fact that the EU tried to regulate this stuff is a shame, because regulation is not a good remedy. End-users have agency here. The solution is to enable end-users to have control in their browser (which they always did, so it's an issue of education, like so many things).
Shame that Google is trying to kill uBO though. Extremely pleased that Brave continues to support it.
Didn't know that about Brave, but it's moot for me since Firefox also supports it and these days I find that Firefox is the better experience, not Chrome or even Chromium.
Usually government mandating something is concerning cause it seems to favor the government for its existence. However with EU commission its actually interesting combination, its representing multiple individual governments at once which somehow works good for the citizens.
Overall this is a common sense solution. The challenge is that a significant industry makes money by collecting and selling data. It makes it harder for businesses who depend on it, they are going to get creative and will eventually come up with some dark pattern to circumvent it.
Also I wanna know when websites don't give a shit about my privacy and therefor have to show a cookie banner. While theoretically not consenting should mean not collecting blocking it altogether and modifying page content might mean "all bets are off". If the website expects you to have made a decision that might wrongly consider it consent.
> he EU Commission finally proposed a solution to the cookie banner problem: automated signals that would communicate your privacy preferences between your device and websites or apps.
It wasn't on EU Commission to "finally propose a solution". The soluton has always been there.
Somehow, Google, aka world's largest tracking and advertising company incidentally making the worlds' dominant browser and completely dominating all web standards, couldn't be bothered, and instead was pushing crap like FLoC
uBlock Origin -> allows blocking dialogs (legally implies refusal of everything not necessary, because you don't agree to something requiring agreement)
Consent-O-Matic -> automated configuration to your preferences using the dialog provided.
I still don't care about cookies -> least privacy friendliest option, because it may opt into undesired tracking (its goal is just to remove the annoyance of the dialogs)
I've wanted the option to select your cookie preferences once and forget in a brower for ever.
I assume the reason this wasn't done initially was corporate pressure (most people would opt-out of everything by default).
1.2 billion exposed users × 8.17 years×365×3 banners/day×4 seconds÷36 is roughly 10-15 billion human hours lost to dealing with damn cookies since GDPR took effect on May 2018.
You would presumably be logged in to your favorite store site, and they would be using your identifying session to make recommendations, not anonymous tracking cookies.
Malicious compliance. You do not need a cookie to "store" the fact you have rejected them. They can simply assume you have rejected them from the lack of cookies. They can store a cookie once you (have gone out of your way to) accept them.
Unless disabling cookies means treating all cookies as session cookies (meaning you can still be followed within a session), this has the fun side effect of breaking pretty much every CAPTCHA firewall like Anubis, Cloudflare Turnstile, and any other that relies on cookies.
Unfortunately this means you have to view a lot of the web through archive.today or web.archive.org - I would know because I have uMatrix configured this way.
Just step back and ask yourself what each side of that debate is trying to achieve and why. What is motivating them? Why are they motivated in that way?
Don't just recite what you "know", think, look, research, figure it out. It might sound good to have a one-liner like this in your back pocket, but do you really believe it after looking at the publicly available information that it is their real intention to conduct a "crusade to destroy the internet"?
It's great. The current law forces people that don't give a shit about user privacy to have a banner (or any other way of asking for consent first) while giving everyone that cares and everyone not wanting to spy on their visitor a free pass.
People click yes too often because it's the easier way to make it go away. This new thing could actually result in a 0% tracking cookie consent rate, effectively making them illegal.
No need to kill the cookie banner. Just change the system so that everyone in every organization who supports cookies and other forms of user tracking and engagement will have every detail of their own existence and their family's existence broadcast in real time globally 24/7/365. Anyone who tries to opt out is jailed under 24 hour surveillance for a minimum of one year.
But of course it’s impossible to convince someone of something when their livelihood depends on their not understanding it.
any sort of elevation prompt, IF I allow them to be popups or an icon in a toolbar, should always be in the same place and not cover the page.
There’s no way this would fly. “I didn’t read it” can’t possibly be an excuse to avoid being bound by an agreement. Every party to an agreement that flaunted its terms, even though they took advantage of the benefits granted by it, would invoke it as a defense, and it’s irrefutable. The system would completely fall apart if this happened.
There’s a balance that needs to be carefully managed here. Yes, fairness to consumers is important. But you can’t destroy the incentive to produce value in so doing.
Only engineers have trouble understanding this. It can be a reasonable defense, and it has successfully been used in courts of law many times. The law is not a machine that compiles text like code literally. Imagine someone who coerces a dying or sick person to sign an agreement they couldn’t possibly be in a reasonable state of mind to understand what they were doing -- the law can and does invalidate such “contracts”. That is the same principle behind age of consent laws. The law could theorerically (and does) invalidate “agreements” which no one is reasonably expected to read and understand.
> The law could theorerically (and does) invalidate “agreements” which no one is reasonably expected to read and understand.
I haven’t heard of a single case where an agreement was voided because “no one could reasonably be expected to understand it.” Unless the language was so impenetrable or vague that the agreement itself could not be discerned. Lawyers tend not to write such agreements.
Also, striking an unconscionable term typically does not void the whole contract. Just the term in question.
The value is derived from the people consuming the product. Placing the "incentive to produce value" above the people who presumably are the source of this value seems...misaligned.
What we need is an environment that does not give the producers asymmetric power over consumers and the products will naturally align with that.
It's YOUR browser, a locally running software on a physical computer YOU own which memorize the cookie key-value pair a remote host told YOU to memorize and YOU return the same value later. It's YOU who allowed the cookie. If YOU don't want to allow the cookie, YOU simply not allow it.
You are technically 100% control on cookie. These JavaScript implemented in-page UI has no guarantee to respect your wish. But you have a power to disable it.
So lawmakers do know how to make legally binding preferences based on device settings? What a crazy innovation.. now if only parents were given these options to indicate their child is using a device.. we could do away with all this Online Safety Act nonsense...
Browsers already had settings for deleting cookies. There was never a reason for banners whose only function was pulling the ladder up from smaller competitors and concentrating power in the hands of an oligopoly that could siphon data directly from the OS.
This coupled with a law mandating ISPs provide a "change IP on demand" feature would have given users a sort of "Tor light" level of privacy. Strong privacy is trivial to achieve for a government that doesn't have a conflicting goal of total surveillance.
https://creepjs.org/checker
The online safety acts and its EU counterparts are somewhat risky, but nobody wants the mention the only proper alternative: a total ban on "social media." Not just for kids, but for everyone. Or a ban on smart phones, that would work too, at least short term. But: money.
This is unfortunately the reality.
The other day a friend asked me to help her make her phone safer for her kids to use. I started by asking if she set permissions on the apps she downloaded. She looked at me blankly, "What permissions?". I proceeded to show her how you can granularly control what you allow each app to do on your phone and what access it is allowed. Her head blew up, she had no idea any of this existed and after gong through a few menus, she didn't care any more. It was all too complicated and too much to think about for a busy mum.
This is why governments unfortunately are having to try to protect people from themselves. As tech competent people it all seems so simple to us, but we need to remember the majority of the population just click 'Allow All' and blow past all permission and security questions as they have no idea what any of it means.
I haven't set up an Android in a while, but, I doubt it's massively different.
We should just give up and give random individuals access to everyone's camera roll.. no other way.
When restoring factory defaults, the same question, just in case the phone is sold, gifted, stolen or whatever.
If you are going to give a phone to a minor you should set that option right from the start.
Exactly. The problem is its from the parents side.
THIS
Holy shit. This is such an obvious fix. And it shuts up those surveillance state goons immediately.
My God, why have we tried to summon up the ghost of 1984 when such a simple fix as this will do.
Parents can lock devices into "child mode" that emits "user is child" headers. Websites can then block.
The blast radius is zero.
Good God, we need to fast track this into browsers right now. If we hurry we might be able to point to this as the technical fix.
Once some of the infrastructure exists, OS vendors can hook into it.
Firefox devs - please do this right now. Please spearhead this.
I might have to vibe code an advocacy site for the spec and set up a GitHub / RFC process.
I've long since considered that the efforts for online child safety should be pointed at educating parents and spearheading some kind of certification of compliance for child safety of software and websites.
[this product is certified to adhere to EU:CSA]
Then you can block everything not certified, and the software that does the blocking would also be certified, the two major prongs you need (endpoints and sites working together: else they're blocked). The rest of the money goes to education for parents about this fact, and the dangers of not doing it, and how to do it.
This is super "easy" (when comparing to the effort it would take for putting backdoors in everything).
Which is why I think that the reason is definitely not child safety, and more about crime control.
Me talking about UK blocking people unless they ID themselves in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979295
Me talking about how its disingenuous because we have superior technical solutions to this particular issue last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010902
Need to look up a bus time? Full screen cookie consent with accept buttons drawn OFF THE SCREEN.
> ...
> You may think that EU privacy law requires cookie banners. But the law is clear: online tracking is prohibited by default.
That's an excellent idea... lets see how its implemented on https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en
Oh... there's a cookie banner.
In the UK a few news sites have changed cookie banners to "you can accept and see this stuff for free, or you can sign up for a subscription, which would you prefer?". It's the only time I hit accept (and then clear browser history).
If blanket preferences from browser signals became the norm, a segment might open up where you would configure preferences and a data broker would make sure you get something in return for your data. At minimum it might force paywalled publishers to consider that as a "lite" subscription option.
ads don't require invasve and pervasive tracking
(see e.g. https://iapp.org/news/a/cjeu-clarifies-cookie-consent-requir... https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/edpb-consent-or-pay-models-s... )
They did not read the text to agree.
It was the fastest way to get the banner to go away. Sometimes they force you to confirm multiple times if you click ”none” or ”minimal”.
I know it seems like you could work around this with careful design and maybe focus groups and such, but I can tell you we regularly uncover surprising insights from (aggregate) trends in front-end events.
So now they'd have a new popup that says "reconfigure your browser to accept tracking, or pay us, or you can't access the page". Which isn't really an improvement.
Sounds good, as long as it covers the "legitimate interest" bollocks⁰ that is often hidden in inconvenient UI nests as well as the basic preference.
-------
[0] "we see your preference not to be stalked, but we want to anyway, click again for every partner to reconfirm you don't want them following you around"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P
Sites that easily allow you to simply reject everything are then a short hop, skip and a jump into browser settings where you auto-reject all cookie/tracking nonsense
An easier step forward could be to make the too often present ridiculous use of dark patterns and endless process to express your lack of consent illegal (and issue colossal fines…)
I guess that most companies just chuck it up there as a default so they dont have to read the law, or maybe they are all actually harvesting and selling personal data and therefore require cookies? Who knows.
I think most companies just don't give a fuck about user privacy and therefor have to show one. There are of course exceptions. But I don't know how many of them have been actual (for-profit) companies.
50% that, and 50% that way more companies than you expect are harvesting and profiting from your data.
That has been my guess as well. If you run npm install half-the-internet you have no idea what's in there, so just slap on that cookie banner for good measure. Of course the real problem is not knowing what's inside your application, but the thought process is "eh, if a blanket cookie banner does the job then that's good enough for me".
On our go-live form there’s a question “do you use cookies” and it’s yes/no. If you say yes legal block the site from going live without the pre approved cookie banner…
I mean that both in the sense of "you, plural" (your company should fix that) and "you, personally" (because diffusion of responsibility is a real issue, and someone needs to actually do it).
Just checking, you do know that still counts as tracking and may fall under GDPR rules? GDPR was never just about cookies.
> Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner.
Fortunately, if you have uBlock Origin, you can enable Easylist cookie notices under annoyances and avoid most of them. Combine with blocking third-party cookies, and the problem pretty much disappears.
The fact that the EU tried to regulate this stuff is a shame, because regulation is not a good remedy. End-users have agency here. The solution is to enable end-users to have control in their browser (which they always did, so it's an issue of education, like so many things).
Shame that Google is trying to kill uBO though. Extremely pleased that Brave continues to support it.
The Do Not Track header is the only technology needed. The rest is compelling companies to obey it.
Overall this is a common sense solution. The challenge is that a significant industry makes money by collecting and selling data. It makes it harder for businesses who depend on it, they are going to get creative and will eventually come up with some dark pattern to circumvent it.
Another good one to have the "hide Youtube shorts" filter, featured on HN a while back.
Also I wanna know when websites don't give a shit about my privacy and therefor have to show a cookie banner. While theoretically not consenting should mean not collecting blocking it altogether and modifying page content might mean "all bets are off". If the website expects you to have made a decision that might wrongly consider it consent.
Consent-O-Matic says "I don't consent".
It wasn't on EU Commission to "finally propose a solution". The soluton has always been there.
Somehow, Google, aka world's largest tracking and advertising company incidentally making the worlds' dominant browser and completely dominating all web standards, couldn't be bothered, and instead was pushing crap like FLoC
Consent-O-Matic -> automated configuration to your preferences using the dialog provided.
I still don't care about cookies -> least privacy friendliest option, because it may opt into undesired tracking (its goal is just to remove the annoyance of the dialogs)
I've wanted the option to select your cookie preferences once and forget in a brower for ever.
I assume the reason this wasn't done initially was corporate pressure (most people would opt-out of everything by default).
1.2 billion exposed users × 8.17 years×365×3 banners/day×4 seconds÷36 is roughly 10-15 billion human hours lost to dealing with damn cookies since GDPR took effect on May 2018.
That's about 17,000 human lives.
I don't want randomnewssite to track me. But a favorite online store...I do want help with recommendations.
It's easier to click a single button than hunt for how to create/access an account for the brand.
Ironically, this has the effect of cookie banners reappearing every time because they cannot place a cookie that says that you have rejected them.
Unfortunately this means you have to view a lot of the web through archive.today or web.archive.org - I would know because I have uMatrix configured this way.
-> not really sensible
Just step back and ask yourself what each side of that debate is trying to achieve and why. What is motivating them? Why are they motivated in that way?
Don't just recite what you "know", think, look, research, figure it out. It might sound good to have a one-liner like this in your back pocket, but do you really believe it after looking at the publicly available information that it is their real intention to conduct a "crusade to destroy the internet"?
(because it drives consumerism)
It's great. The current law forces people that don't give a shit about user privacy to have a banner (or any other way of asking for consent first) while giving everyone that cares and everyone not wanting to spy on their visitor a free pass.
Cookies were never a problem. Just get rid of the banner.
This other legislation should pass/fail on its own merit.