This is a jaw-drop moment for me every single time I observe someone else using the web and quickly clicking "accept" on every single cookie banners that pops up, without ever wasting a second even reading what they're accepting. It's mind boggling to me. Sure, I'm in IT, so surely I'm more aware of data mining, profiling, and other privacy-related aspects. But in many cases, you could just click "reject" and the banner would also disappear...
To me, having a browser setting for cookies is the only sane way to handle this, it's surprising that this was not considered from the beginning.
Some variant on "reject" takes more effort like 70% of the time. Which is on purpose, of course. The ones that aren't maliciously-complying have a "necessary only" button that insta-closes it, but tons pretend that you might want to allow some spying but not all of it and make you go through another screen if you don't just "accept all".
> To me, having a browser setting for cookies is the only sane way to handle this, it's surprising that this was not considered from the beginning.
Then it'd be possible to default it to "nope" (Firefox, and perhaps Safari, might do this) or to allow a "never, anywhere" setting the first time the question is asked, and malware and spyware vendors know that'd mean a much larger proportion of denials.
Naturally in a camera meeting with a "don't tell anyone we said that" appended right before.
The marketing people in the meeting were very angry that California was "doing it to them".
There is nothing stopping a website from using cookies regardless of the banner. If they are outside EU jurisdiction then there won't be any consequences either.
The legislators were and are dumb. They have wasted an enormous amount of collective time for no benefit. Big corporations continued doing what they were doing and nefarious third parties could still track you.
They did. The laws were airtight in this regard. They simply lost -- whether through a last minute "tweak" or undermined enforcement mechanism I do not know, but I do know that the current state of affairs was fully anticipated and headed off at the point where I reviewed the proposal. Your vitriol is bass ackwards -- the lesson is to strengthen the walls between corporations and the legislative process and support enforcement mechanisms, because those were the places where the process failed. Not the intelligence of legislators. Otherwise you will keep losing to the corporations, and you will deserve to.
GDPR article 7 and its various recital already include that. GDPR wisely doesn't get into technical details like "cookie banners" anywhere, but various national agencies did set guidance and it's usually quite explicit: Rejection must be as simple as acceptance and reject buttons or link must be as prominent as the accept buttons and links.
For example, CNIL, the French data privacy authority, clearly says[1]:
"The CNIL has received complaints about dark patterns on cookie consent banners encouraging data subjects to accept cookies.
As a reminder, with certain exceptions, cookies can only be used with the consent of data subjects. Moreover, rejecting cookies should be just as easy as accepting them."
And gives examples of dark patterns such as different button sizes, multiple accept buttons, hidden reject buttons, etc.
The law and specific guidance is pretty unambiguous. This purely an enforcement problem. The regulatory bodies do not have the resources to go and chase most individual companies, and the non-profit NGOs that go after the violators apparently don't have the budget to make enough impact and scare companies into compliance.
[1] https://www.cnil.fr/en/dark-patterns-cookie-banners-cnil-iss...
But of course, designing the system that pushes people to make this sort of decision was absolutely intentional.
So even when it's incompetence, it's still malicious, just in a way that obscures the explicit decision-making that led to the result.
I think it's absolutely fair and unlikely to be illegal to use a cookie to remember cookie preferences. Unless the cookie value was not yes/no, but something like a precise timestamp that could be used for uniquely identifying.
Clicking those "REJECT!" buttons might make you feel empowered, but it's pointless. Just set your browser to delete all the cookies at the end of the session except for whatever sites you want to allow to 'remember' you.
The whole thing has always been a problem to be properly solved by the browser, and it's probably just the fact that Google makes the only browser that matters, that it's been foisted upon every website owner, who mostly just wants basic analytics and to track conversions from the ads they run, and isn't "selling your data."
The browser is your user agent. If it's sending any information up to web servers on every request that isn't okay with you, why are you using it?
Exactly. I use the "I don't care about cookies" extension, which rejects most cookies automatically without me having to see the popups. But even accepting cookies is fine - I'll be closing my browser soon anyway and they'll be gone.
Sure, your browser cookie will be gone. But you have already allowed the server-side identifiers of your session to be used for whatever purpose, including reconstituting increasingly larger parts of your identity over multiple disconnected sessions. Please don't make the mistake of thinking that clearing your cookies afterwards is the same as rejecting all server-side processing.
My company scanned 209 European regulated sites in June, and roughly 7 in 10 had tracking that wasn't correctly gated by consent. It's rarely indifference, though. DPOs in the EU hold too much weight for that. It's usually a tag added that was never wired into the CMP or something added by a dev or LLM without going through proper review
Full disclosure: I run https://consentmark.com, which measures what tags actually fire under each consent state to create evidence packs companies can show regulators
> something added by a dev or LLM without going through proper review
FWIW, this was a problem long before LLMs were a thing, and it didn't get worse with LLMs. If anything, I'd expect LLMs to get it right by default, because ones ~everyone is using are all trained straight, they won't just silently read between the lines and write code/configs to facilitate one's illegal business model.
It is known that warnings and pop-ups that show up almost all the time yield diminishing returns. I think it was named "normalization of deviation" by some folks in a blog a while ago, and I believe that name fits. If you get warned about missing https all the time, or that something might be dangerous (even though it does precisely what you want it to do), it will loose its effect by the time you actually need it.
You can argue this is malicious compliance, but if you want it to go away it would probably be easier to go for banning tracking and personalized ads altogether. Eliminate the reason for this behavior, so to speak.
So I'm not onboard with the "just block everything by default" crowd. If you frame the question as "Would you like ads to be more relevant to you" instead of "Do you want to allow tracking" you probably get a very different answer from users.
I would like the cookie banner to be changed to a browser setting, but I also would like the option to allow some sites to show relevant ads to me.
There is one. It's a DNT header. Knucklehead websites ignore it.
> Hacker News Information: If you create a Hacker News account (ID and profile), we do not collect any Personal Information unless you choose to provide your email address and/or information in the "about" field (“HN Information”). Your submissions to, and comments you make on, the Hacker News site are not Personal Information and are not "HN Information" as defined in this Privacy Policy.
Like it or not, the Web is a two-way street, meaning that the server end of the transaction doesn't owe the client end anything in particular unless there's some relationship in place (like a payment). It appears the "just ignore it" matches the intent of most web users, though, since an overwhelming majority of web visitors accept a bunch of spammy ads + free 'content,' and a slim minority pay for ad-free alternatives.
Good. No one is entitled to a business model working in perpetuity. Doubly so when it's ethically dubious.
The very thing entrepreneurs are glorified for - their ability to invent and execute on new business models. They'll manage, don't worry about them. Hopefully they'll settle on more honest models this time.
So do car alarms.
I'm not convinced this is a business model I want to exist. We had an internet before it, and Google, and Facebook. I'm increasingly sad we can't return to it.
And I'd gladly trade today's BS for any version of "The Internet" pre-2007.
But the "Before" Internet wasn't some natural sustainable state.
Before 1997 or so, "the Internet" was being paid for by academic institutions and big companies, and wasn't really all that commercial at all. It was also pretty tiny and blessedly simple. Honestly this version is the most achievable (re-creatable?) today since we can set up indie websites much easier today than we could then. Instead of using your free webspace from your university or employer, 20 of us could share a $5 a month instance, and link to each other's webpages, and add an IRC server to that instance just for fun.
In the 1998-2007 era, the Internet got a lot bigger, but was also still pretty fun and not that enshittified, but that's just because it was being paid for by VC money being burned.
Today we are where we are in terms of business model[1] because Google and Facebook achieved great success with ad-based business models because of the ability to target ads better, and because consumers of The Internet have spoken, loudly, with their closed wallets. They've said "We will only pay for content if it's All The Music and ~$10 a month flat rate, or if it's a big/interesting enough video on-demand service and under $20 a month. We'll never pay for news or text content of any kind." So, the businesses with other types of content do what the public wants them to do: have cost-free content whose access is conditional on being advertised to very annoyingly, or they marginalize themselves with paywalls, subscribed to by only a small minority of users.
[1] i'm setting aside the non-business aspects of our mess, namely the poison that social media, 'engagement' optimization, and ragebait-as-news has wrought on society.
There's an old saying in advertising, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half." - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/
The supposed benefit of the current model is to find and eliminate that wasted half.
Facebook has shown me ads for dick pills and boob surgery, ads I can't read because I don't know the Cyrillic alphabet, and ads for services that only apply to citizens of nations I've never been a citizen of who moved to a country I had in fact moved out of.
The reports I hear from people who buy ad slots are mostly unimpressed with the results; the word on the grapevine is that the "success" cases are not even average customers, but those who are vulnerable to getting scammed.
Now, if you want to read an article you have to pay $20/month to that news organization in perpetuity. I don’t see how that can be expected to work.
Or, I liked one single page of an amputee woman (I am myself) and now all I see are amputee women.
They just buy all the competitors, but they aren't good at all.
The law that caused the cookie banners also says companies cannot block access to the site if the cookies are not required for the functioning of the site.
Some German news sites have broken this and have "accept or pay" and I think this leaked to news sites in other countries. Facebook even tried it.
So, sure, if DNT is true, try to make people pay. Fine by me.
- even if you accept the tracking, you might still not be able to read the article, because while the site may be free in principle if you accept ads, that specific article is not.
- and the most annoying thing is that such paywalled articles show up on Google News. Not sure if they're tricking Google into showing them (by showing the full article to search crawlers, but the paywall to actual users), or if this is some understanding between Google and EU news providers, but it's annoying...
Oftentimes the reject flow is substantially more annoying than the accept flow. I click reject myself when it's an option, but I can absolutely understand how people might get conditioned to click accept when clicking reject might result in more popups.
If you made a website and you said "To view the private content on my website, you have to either pay me, or sign a name, any name you wish, in my guestbook" what business is it of the government to say "No, this random person refuses to pay or sign the book, but Thom, you have to let them see all your articles anyway."
Note that I used "sign any name" as the metaphor, not "show ID," since it is trivial to not allow any important information exchange if you simply delete the cookies yourself, which is easy to configure a browser to do. The end-user has the choice, if it's so important to them, to configure their browser. Even Chrome can be configured for which sites to allow cookies, which to disallow, and which to clear when the browser closes (the smart choice, since accepting them and throwing them away soon after is the undetectable option that accomplishes your main aim).
More: "To view the private content on my website, you have to either pay me, or let more businesses connect the dots between this content and the rest of your internet browsing habits, than there were students and teachers combined in your high school."
Yes, it is technically possible to fake this content, or to auto-delete it.
But https://xkcd.com/2501/ applies. "It's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the privacy settings for Safari and one or two Chromium derivatives."
(Real world user familiarity with software is much, much worse; this is an old survey now, but look at the chart near the bottom: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/)
You simply will have to go out of business.
This is also why you see many large companies fighting for more regulation. It's harder for a competitor to emerge if they have to navigate mountains of red tape.
I simply will have to go out of business.
Sorry that you need the government to "help" people in this way, by forcing other people to give them free things.
However the UK does have its own GDPR regulation (see: <https://www.gov.uk/data-protection>), though my understanding is that it may be less strict in requiring equivalence between "accept" and "reject" actions. (I may be wrong on this.)
UK sites accessed from the EU would have to be under EU GDPR compliance.
What harm are you worried about?
Lack of privacy harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say.
These banners handle both ePrivacy consent for cookies etc, but also GDPR Art. 6(1)(a) for processing purposes (personalised ads, measurement, audience insights, precise geolocation, even device fingerprinting).
They will fingerprint you with or without cookies. They may or not try to honor your preferences, but their "partners" will not try, and by the time you see that banner, it's all out there.
"Accept" is the close button.
This is exactly what browsers did back the 90s, they asked about every single cookie.
Then browsers got configurable options to simply accept either all cookies, no cookies, or only first party cookies (excluding third party sites unrelated to the domain you visited).
For now well over 20 years I have disabled 3rd party cookies in all browsers I use, and only in a few cases overall did I need to make exemptions.
There's a mismatch between the velocity at which people visit sites and the time it takes to navigate the cookie particulars of each site.
And, we can dismiss this as people being uninformed or lazy but the reality it is that's actually not so unreasonable. Cookies are in some ways near the bottom of the list where privacy is concerned, given everything else from breaches to search dossiers to device finger-printing to mobile device location-tracking to the ubiquity of cameras in the real world, and on and on.
The idea that we're clawing back privacy in any meaningful sense by blocking a few cookies here and there is kind of quaint.
People do not have a right (morally speaking, not legally) to access or use a service (or a website) etc without having to read/agree to the terms (applies to analog and digital).
We really need to stop companies from putting up these insanely complicated legal texts to use basic services when they could all be behind standard contracts.
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE APPLE SOFTWARE AND SERVICES ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”
https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSTahoe.pdf
The same point applies to most of the text. But yes, some text is specific to the service. E.g. the same doc above says in bold:
"By using the Content Caching Features of the Apple Software, you agree that Apple may download and cache such Apple Eligible Content on your Caching Enabled Mac."
I'd say that's something worth knowing if you use that OS.
If your terms require people to get a law degree and take a week to parse the 400 page document, then I would argue that it's a tactic to get people to sign up for the service without fully understanding it.
We need legislation that forces companies to communicate the terms in a way that an average person can comprehend.
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.
The default is “no”. Without explicit consent you can’t do a lot of things.
You can’t have a default yes, because how can you agree with consent but automatically to everything?
And if it’s a no, are you saying you can’t ask a user for permission to use their data for a specific purpose?
And if you can ask, that’s what we have right now.
How often do you get prompted for, say, secure DNS or HTTP? Almost never, because your browser has sane defaults and controls that. So, there you go.
I mean, it's even the literal truth: they value your privacy in the sense of having their software do a little internal auction to put a price on it.
P.S.: No true Scotsman spotted
What browsers would those be?
If people really cared, they’d chose reputable suppliers that sell non toxic food. If they are eating food with lead, they don’t care.
Don’t force your wordview on people through regulation
As opposed to enforcing your worldview with a lack of regulation?
Because that's precisely what's happening, with the advertisement industry enforcing their worldview through lack of compliance.
You could, for example, require that user answers very specific questions regarding 10 randomly selected partners and how exactly they can use the data ("is partner x allowed to build very detailed profile of you and target you with political adverts that are designed to manipulate you?").
We're borderline already there today when the cost of switching is typing a different url at the top of the screen. You add some mandatory 20 minute wait and you'll never see a new site again.
Google and Facebook would love it though.
For example, in The Netherlands there is a legally mandated three-day period after signing the contract for purchasing a home during which the buyer can still call off the deal.
The reasoning for this is that it is a seller's market, with demand far outnumbering supply. In practice it is very common these days to end up in a bidding war, and even forego any kind of "sale is void if home inspection turns up issues" clause. Want to think about it for a day or two before signing the biggest contract of your life? Too bad, another buyer is willing to sign today.
With the mandatory three-day waiting period you avoid buyers being locked into a contract they basically immediately regret. It gives them some time to do due diligence, reducing the risk of buying a complete lemon. The seller can ask for a similar clause to be inserted, but it is less common. After all, the only risk to the seller is getting slightly less money for it, and that's already mostly dealt with during the bidding process.
The reason this isn't done is because corporations legal departments love writing 10-100 page contracts that absolutely nobody is going to read.
The law really has nothing to do with cookies, it has to do with privacy, tracking, and PII. You can absolutely save preferences and perform analytics. What you can't do is hoard data that is personally identifiable for purposes that are not obvious to the consumer.
How many requests per second are being served? How many error codes were delivered to clients? How quickly the service responded? Service logs without PII? All perfectly fine to aggregate and analyze without consent.
Acting dense like this isn't productive... And literally this information would be stores as anonymous user 12345, but that still would require consent (probably, or at least arguably).
Is it a violation to send data that could theoretically be used for more invasive tracking than you actually do? I don't think so, or else you'd need consent just to receive an IP packet.
Stats like that are only used to implement dark patterns better and justify user hostile decisions since pretty much the time the idea of telemetry was introduced. Otherwise, we'd live in the world of perfect web ui and we're not.
Good.
> and you can't run a serious website without some kind of analytics.
I don't believe you.
> Preference-storing does as well, despite any reasonable user expecting that, if they set a preference, it will be saved.
IANAL, but I'm given to understand that this is untrue.
What do you see as the harm in website owners using aggregated analytics data to improve their sites?
Practical: Supposedly-aggregated stats have a history of actually being perfectly possible to analyze back into individually identifiable information. Also, it's conveniently the same tech stack in a way that makes it easier to make an actual slippery slope.
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.
I just visited theguardian.com to see their cookie banner. The banner says this:
> Your Privacy (`x` button to close the tab)
> US residents have certain rights with regard to the sale or sharing of personal information to third parties.
> Guardian News and Media and our partners use information collected through cookies or in other forms to improve experience on our site and pages, analyze how it is used and show personalized advertising.
> You can opt out of the sale of all of your personal information by pressing
> <button>Do not sell or share my personal information</button>
It's 3 sentences, plus a button that says "Do not sell or share my personal information". I actually don't even think this is GDPR compliant, because my layman's understanding says that GDPR consent must be presented as opt-in, rather than opt-out. (I guess they are going for CCPA/CPRA compliance?) But anyway, I would think that a reasonable person could be expected to notice a button that says "Do not sell or share my personal information" and then click it, especially when it's portrayed prominently at the bottom of the page.
> Personalised advertising - it's your choice
> Independent, quality original journalism needs your support.
> Please choose an option.
> * Accept personalised advertising and all cookies
> We use cookies and similar technologies to support the Guardian and personalise your experience in other ways. To do this we work with a cross section of [139 partners].
> - or -
> * Reject all and subscribe to Guardian Ad-Lite for €5 per month
> Read the Guardian website without personalised advertising. This does not include ad-free. You will still see non-personalised advertising and we may still use cookies and similar technologies to improve our site.
Followed by:
> Some cookies are necessary to help our website work properly and can’t be switched off. Find out more in our privacy policy and cookie policy, and manage the choices available to you at any time by going to ‘Privacy settings’ at the bottom of any page.
> Cookies and similar technologies collect information from your device and may be used to access personal data about you including page visits and IP addresses. We use this information about you, your devices and your online interactions with us to provide, analyse and improve our services. We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
> * Store and/or access information on a device
> * Personalised advertising, advertising measurement, audience research and services development
> * Personalised content and content measurement
And finally the buttons:
> ( Accept all ) ( Reject all and subscribe )
> If you already have Guardian Ad-Lite or read the Guardian ad-free, [sign in]
Because this is there 1 millionth cookie banner, because every site and their momma has one.
Also, 90% of cookie banners are not this good. They tell you nothing, hide the "reject" button behind multiple screens, etc. At that point the consumer is trained to click accept.
This is the definition of informed consent
However, since we are discussing the banner that The Guardian website shows to US viewers, I assume they’re trying to comply with California privacy law, which does allow opt-out regarding the sale of personal information.
wat
GDPR says that opt-out is the default, and if you are asking for consent, it had to be clear, unambiguous, and with both chouces clearly present.
Not legal: you have to click a button to be opted out, otherwise you're opted in. (Opt-out as a verb)
Legal: you are opted out by default (opt-out as an adjective describing the default situation)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/opt-in
You've muddled the definitions again. "opt" signifies an action by the user.
If I am "in a group" by default, then I can take an action to "opt out", requesting to be removed from the list.
If I am not initially joined to the group, then I can take an action to "opt in" and be added to the list.
There is no such thing as "opt by default". That is not a user action. It also makes no sense for the same list or group to be both "opt in" and "opt out" because, as adjectives, they imply the default states and they describe the user action taken to change that default.
opt-in: default state is out
opt-out: default state is in
But anyway. What exactly do you mean by “buried or obscured”?
As I said above, if the parties cannot be said to have an agreement because the terms of the agreement itself are inscrutable, then that would probably result in no contract being formed, or the terms at issue interpreted in the light most favorable to the non-drafting party. Like if the terms were presented in so small a font that only someone with a microscope could have read them, or it was written cryptographically or is gibberish.
Basically you have to successfully argue that no reasonable person could have read and understood the agreement. You’re unlikely to prevail if you argue only that you, the individual, did not. (Unless the court also finds you are incapable of entering into any contract because you’re a minor, are non compos mentis, etc.)
I suppose you can claim I am wrong to believe that, but it is accurate for me to state that I _do_ believe it, which is why I didn’t list me being wrong as one of the possibilities. Practically speaking, that is the first possibility I enumerated.
I should note that in my example, imagine neither doc is any more inscrutable than all the TOS we encounter in the wild, instead it is the construction (the fact it is a footnote link) that makes it easy to miss the additional doc.
Also, striking an unconscionable term typically does not void the whole contract. Just the term in question.
Aside from that many of these contract have terms that might be considered substantive unconscionability - for example if terms state that what you post can be used by the company that owns the service for marketing of the company or the service I feel this would not make it through most legal systems that I feel before the attempt are not inherently corrupt.
As an example I have an email account with site A. I go to site A and log in, they suddenly spring a large new contract for me to read, I cannot get through to do what I came to do, it will take me 5 minutes to read so I click OK because I am on my way to check my email with site A. Procedurally this is not reasonable behavior.
What would be reasonable?
"Hi, we are changing our terms of service, you can see it at this link and agree. If you don't have the time right now you can do it later, but in three days you will lose access to the service unless you agree to terms."
There are however lots of other laws in the EU which may in fact make this behavior substantively unconscionable anyway. I certainly believe there would also be substantive arguments to be made in this case.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Just read avtalslagen paragraf 30. It says just that. And it is different from paragraf 36.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...
"Disney is trying to have a widower's wrongful death lawsuit dismissed and sent to arbitration because the man had signed up for a Disney+ account several years ago."
Now what happened was that Disney quit fighting over really bad PR. But the court challenge would have liteky succeeded.
Mozilla with their Thundermail just tried saying in their ToS that if you're mentioned at all in anything legal, you agree to pay their legal fees.
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.
Also, sarcasm isn’t welcome here. Please read the HN guidelines.
Ah yes, I didn't couch my post in any of the various, rampant HN-friendly versions of shitposting. I'll try to follow your example from here on out. Excellent touch citing the guidelines at me after your role in this thread, A+.
Re-reads this thread, taking notes
HN is supposed to have higher than typical standards for participation than most internet fora and is largely self policing. It’s not condescending to tell people when they are misbehaving. Nor is it condescending to explain to people the law and how things work, provided you’re not insulting them in the process. Which I’m not doing.
I find much more concerning people’s certainty of their mistaken understandings and beliefs, combined with the most ludicrous possible interpretation of other’s positions.
Or that any actual human is aware that an agreement was made (since an AI can find a checkbox nowadays or software can be configured to bypass it). One way to add balance could be to require people asking for contracts to actually treat them like real serious legal documents, show up for the signing, and figure out who they are making an agreement with.
Prinicipal-agent law predates computers by a very long time.
As it stands I just hit Accept on literally everything and that’s fine for me.
It already pushes the correct "Reject" button for you on a lot of sites (not all; it works based on rule lists)
When was the last time you read an entire EULA before installing software?
I'm going to guess the time frame is somewhere around "never."
These are nuisance contracts designed to jade people with legalese while stealing their rights to things like class action and enforcing binding arbitration.
Standard contracts sounds like the way to go.
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.
Every time you get a cookie banner with options, the website wants to know more about you than the law permits by default.
When prompted by the browser on first login/signup, yes, the same way the password manager works. With stored passwords, keeping the login cookie doesn't even add much value.
Well, there is a skip button. It's labelled "accept all"
It’s baffling we’re having this misunderstanding on this site in 2026 still.
Browser fingerprinting / Panopticlick: <https://ssd.eff.org/module/what-fingerprinting> <https://panopticlick.org/>
On-device identifiers --- Google AdID (GAID), Apple IDFA, etc.: <https://developer.transmitsecurity.com/guides/risk/secure_de...> <https://geraguard.com/blog/how-device-fingerprinting-works-m...> <https://alejandrocordon.com/blog/2025/01/18/unique-identifie...>.
And BYW, browser headers can even be a violation if it's determined that you are using them for tracking users in a way that violates ePrivacy demands.
It's still a cookies thing.
The cookie banner isn't about the usage of cookies, it's about _the underlying tracking_. You're allowed to "just" use cookies for normal shit! You can make a website where you use cookies to store login state for a user, without a single banner.
The thing is that every company in the world feels the need to add 1000 tracking cookies to anonymous users to track them through conversion funnels (on top of the ad stuff). That's what you have to inform people about
You can use cookies normally without a banner! You can't track without consent! Every cookie banner is actually a "we want to track you" banner. Calling it a cookie banner is playing into the confusion about what those banners actually are meant to communicate
It's not hard to make privacy work when you are the government rather than working against a hostile one.
So instead everyone stays on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter, which ALSO operate on ads and have far more information on their users than any third-party ad tracker could ever have.
None of this has gotten rid of the privacy problems. It just consolidated them into the worst offenders while jeopardizing the plurality of the web. Now instead of people being tracked by Facebook on a website with a third-party cookie in a like button, they are tracked by Facebook on Facebook in a Facebook page because they never leave Facebook.
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.
Greatest minds of our generation couldn’t possibly invent fast profile switching.
Lost technology.
Bit of a mouthful though.
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.
It'd be even better if there was a way for people to selectively turn it off for specific devices without MITM the connections. It wouldn't be that hard to come up with a mechanism for that.
Yes, as a parent, you are required to put in more effort into parenting your kid than random hypothetical people. That's obvious, and has been the case forever.
I understand the concept of community, but community is not me sacrificing my privacy for someone 1000 miles away.
If parents don't want to do X, Y, and Z to lock down their devices then that is their right. And I support their rights, so the conversation is over right then and there IMO.
The aim here is to protect the children. "Just let parents protect them" doesn't work when there's millions of parents that won't care.
Exactly. The problem is its from the parents side.
Options between "we don't have tech in the house" and "wide-open tech, we have it all" are all some amount of painful, usually for no good reason.
(I remember once investigating how to do some pretty basic stuff for this in Linux, hoping to find something nicer than manually setting some executable permissions and firewall rules and then having to go back and change them all the time, and the closest thing to a guide I found was an old article from Red Hat that basically lead with "LOL, good luck you poor sap, Linux sucks at this" before going on to explain the various bad ways available to sort-of, but not entirely, accomplish it with a lot of work, and significant ongoing time-burden)
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.
CA tried this with AB 1856. I wasn't a fan of this (neither was EFF) because of the privacy and tracking concerns of blasting the fact that the user is a child to all websites.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/one-step-forward-two-s...
It would better for the block to happen at the device level. That is, the browser knows it's on a child's device and has a whitelist of allowed sites.
There is already an RTA (Restriced to Adults) header where the website self-labels that it's for adults only and the browser can block it while protecting the user's privacy. I'd prefer expanding the use of RTA.
The web is too big and changes too much and that's before we get to the issue of applying laws to a whitelist based on different juristictions worldwide.
And I have to question, who would administer it? The parents? They won't. Google or Apple? Why do they want to deal with irate parents or culture wars around what is or is not on the list?
There is obvious increasing demand for this from parents, politicians are going to act on it, I think a "this is a child" header is the only one that actually really works. It works for the parents because it's easy to setup. It works for websites because they can cleanly identify a child and filter content if appropriate.
It seems to me that every other solution than a "this is a child" header is either impractical or way worse.
Yes, granted, a globally enforced whitelist probably wouldn't work. I'm referring to bespoke lists that parents control. I know plenty of parents that use this. e.g. here's Apple's feature:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121#:~:text=Prevent%20ina...
> It works for websites because they can cleanly identify a child and filter content if appropriate.
This still doesn't solve the problem of different jurisdictions and culture wars of what is or isn't appropriate for kids. All this does is move the liability upstream to websites instead of the devices. That is, instead of the browser deciding what's appropriate, now Youtube, Reddit, etc have to decide. And, as we've seen with the OSA in the UK, typically smaller platforms can't handle the enforcement cost so they just shut down entirely.
https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/
The larger platforms often use overbroad CYA measures and throw up age verification where they don't need to (Reddit has done this in the EU), or just ban minors (Anthropic and character.ai did this).
As far as blocking explicit content, a self-labeling requirement like RTA accomplishes the same thing as a "this is a child" header but without the liability CYA and without the privacy concerns.
Where the "this is a child" header solution could theoretically win is allowing kids to access websites in a limited child-safe way, e.g. going to Reddit in child mode automatically shuts off certain subreddits. But, as we've seen, it just doesn't work well in practice and usually frustrates parents by overly broad content policing and liability theater. Kids are also at different levels of maturity and I've seen them get frustrated when they're binned into age categories that they feel they don't deserve. e.g. a 12 year old might be plenty mature enough for the 13-16 age category.
But my real objection to the "this is a child header" is the privacy risk and surveillance risk. I don't think it's worth it.
You mentioned AB1856 which seems waaaaay broader than emitting an age bracket header based on user settings. It puts the onus on the website operator to not only prevent presenting content to wrong age bracket users, but also to determine the age bracket of the user.
Websites are shutting down wholesale because they cannot reasonably afford the CYA, or dont want to out of principle.
In echelons scheme the parent would be voluntarily setting the age bracket on the childs device right, so if a 12 year old is more mature, then go ahead and set their device to emit the 13-16 age bracket header. If you as a parent dont believe in this, then leave the bracket unset.
For a website operator it would be trivial to block the user from accessing the site if the suggested age bracket is too low (as long as we can agree on a single way of doing things, of course). Larger operators can do more heavy content moderation and present a filtered view to those same age bracketed users.
It is true you are adding more tracking signals, and I am sensitive to the free speech issues, but children are not fully emancipated members of society yet and parents need tools to deal with the difficulties of raising children in a digital society. The alternative now seems to be OSA-like, which is even more intrusive and a risk to privacy and perhaps free society as a whole.
Of course, OSA is really the goal and not the method, and we have to remember it is never about the children. Would children have been protected from e.g. andrew mountbatten if OSA had been around at that time?
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
I'm not sure to understand the proposed solution here, but it seems someone could just use a different web browser client who don't inherit these restrictions.
There are so few sites where I really need cross-site logins to work that an opt-in would be much more preferable.
Have all sites set cookies on whichever third party they want, but don't share those cookies over. Add an explicit "Do you really want foo.com to share data with bar.com?" if you really need to see those facebook comments on your news site.
No cookie banner is required for functionally necessary cookies.
EU official website in it’s cookie banner glory: https://european-union.europa.eu/index_fr
I get similarly upset, when I see Google tracking on official websites of government or public institutions.
No, they don't really need to track you, that's why it requires consent to do it.
They are doing exactly what they say.
In other words, they're not saying don't track your visitors. They're saying get consent first.
https://commission.europa.eu/resources/europa-web-guide/desi...
> Use of the cookie consent kit is mandatory on each page of the DGs and executive agencies-owned websites, regardless of the cookies used.
if they didn't use third party cookies they wouldn't need it
Also AFAIK the Google Fonts question (is the IP alone already PII, if Google has no way of tying the IP to a person) has not been decided by the ECJ yet. There've only been decisions by lower level German courts that are still in dispute.
"Well if the cookie comes from a third party it implicitly allows tracking."
Yes, because this makes tracking possible you have to gather consent first, regardless if tracking actually happens. Very bad solution, they could just define how data can be legally used, instead of also overreaching by defining how data can be legally transmitted.
> strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.
One very ignored qualifier here is "information society service". This is defined in Directive 2015/1535 and one of the requirements is that the service is "normally provided for remuneration". That is usually understood to mean that the service needs to be tied to provider's economic activity. This effectively excludes, for example, public authorities websites which are for their own public duties. It does however include e.g. ad supported websites.
And yes, I'm aware that many national implementations actually miss that qualifier. That can save the non-commercial private sector websites, but public authorities do not benefit from Member States failing to transpose Directive correctly.
People act shocked when it leads to unintended side effects, but companies legal teams are just telling them they have no idea how a judge will interpret these broad wordings in regards to their business.
People say this fixes "future loopholes" but as you see with the cookie banner, it just leads to every company assuming the worst case scenario.
Going back years of conversation on cookie banners you'll see a constant argument on when they're required or not precisely because it's not defined explicitly.
3% of people want to be tracked online? I think it's more likely that 3% of people misunderstood the survey question
I don't really use youtube natively a lot anymore, but I used to with Google's "personalised ads" turned off. I don't know if you've tried that, but the ads Google serves you if you opt out of personalised adds are sketchy, creepy and mostly not child appropriate (a lot of medical stuff, plus adverts for mail order brides etc). Back then I opted in to personalised ads because being tracked seemed a better option to me than being served inappropriate material without my consent.
Anyway, that's a long rant, but my point is, there's edge-cases and weird contexts in which I can imagine people saying something like "of the options I see as likely to happen, I'd most like to be tracked".
I do not want the gas station, or the airplane I'm on, spying on me to build relevant advertising. That is the end game of "relevant ads": my gas pump already serves me ads, the airplane I'm on serves me ads, my own car now (via a software update that occurred after purchase) serves me ads. Monitors now serve ads. TVs are abusing people's Internet connections, which isn't ads, but it's basically the same problem: if I can abuse the customer without consequence, why shouldn't I?
Just no. The problem is, I as a consumer cannot vote with my wallet: companies can and will go "I could take your money, and earn $X, or I could do that and ads and earn $X + $Y."; there is not reason for them to choose the former, and most markets are so concentrated (e.g., airlines) that there is not ample competition for the market to provide ample "vote with wallet" choices. Further, in the car example, it's just bait and switch: even when I think I can vote with my wallet, the company can just alter the terms of the deal, knowing full well the switching price of a car makes me subservient to them.
Why? Plenty of websites operate just fine with no or near-zero ads. Just look at the one you are currently on!
And what's with confusing "relevant ads" with "privacy-invading targeted ads"? There's still plenty of ads in print media, on television, and on billboards: none of them are invading my privacy, yet they still manage to be relevant by choosing a medium with a certain target demographic. Websites used to do the same, there's no technical reason we can't return to this.
Any future law in regards to this will likely just lead to the companies that already got consent (companies you already have accounts with) becoming even deeper entrenched.
Non targeted ads pay a small percentage of targeted ads.
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”.
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
Advertisers are willing to pay more for privacy-invading ads because they believe they are more effective. If privacy-invading ads were illegal they'd just go back to context-dependent ads like they have been using for the thousands of years before the internet was invented, and after an adjustment period the revenue will just bounce back to where it was before.
Most advertisers know this already. If privacy-invading ads were so effective, why are all the major brands now using influencers to market their products? Why go through the effort of finding a specific Instagram channel which might be a good fit and convincing the operator to enter a brand deal, when you could also just directly pay Instagram for a highly-targeted ad one swipe away?
That's what the tracking industry keeps telling you with zero evidence it's true.
And then there are studies like this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016781162 which say that targeted ads need to be 100% to 700% more effective to be as profitable as non-targeted ads
(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... )
Again, that is not a requirement. If your argument is that they give us content for free because of ads, ads don't require pervasive and invasive tracking. Or hiding stuff behind paywalls (since ads pay for it).
Im pretty sure if a company said something like "Here have free netflix for life, as long as you install this browser plugin that provides us with information about your shopping habits" millions of people would bite their hand off.
> When the law takes effect in January 2027, Californians will see new privacy options in web browsers. When enabled, these controls will automatically inform websites of their privacy preferences, helping to protect personal information from being sold to data brokers and other third parties. This means they will be able to protect their data — like their browsing history, location data, purchase history, and personal interests — across the entire internet with a single step.
Need to look up a bus time? Full screen cookie consent with accept buttons drawn OFF THE SCREEN.
Your kind comes into every one of these threads and says some version of "well if they weren't tracking then they'd have nothing to worry about and no need to show a banner", but that is so obviously not true to anyone who uses the web. You absolutely do not need to defend a law that is not working.
Browser-based privacy controls were proposed in the late-90s/early-2000's as P3P, and were killed by corporate interests.
Put a note in your calendar, write a letter and send it then.
btw, the link say it's around 3% of people who want to be tracked when the reports state it's between 3 and 10%. it's misleading.
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"
Even the use of the word "cookie" is framing by industry to confuse people.
Good websites sharing stuff for the fun of it rarely ever add these obnoxious banners. They probably should if they embed other trackers (like Youtube or Google Fonts) but often just don't. It's only the ones that want to make money off you that bother putting in the obnoxious banners.
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.
See here[0], page 6:
> As stated in Article 5(3) ePD: ‘This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.’
0: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/documents/2024-10/ed...
As long as you do not share that info with 3rd party, and the user requested it, you can store via cookies pretty much whatever you want without the need for a consent screen
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
Full guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You're welcome
> ...
> 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.
I'm visiting a website, i don't want to make a legal agreement with every website ...
Social media bad for kids? Everyone hand over your ID at the door ...
Then you blame the government.
I don't have a lot of confidence for legislative solutions. Although I admire people who keep trying.
Oh.
Perhaps the EU Commission could start by stopping the circus on its own website and killing its own cookie banner: https://commission.europa.eu/index_en
He asked me "So, how would you make the Internet better at Google?".
My response, "Setup preferences in Chrome to eliminate all popups including Cookie banners".
I never got a call back for the second interview.
The answer is simple. Don't use tracking cookies.
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.
If the banner's not required, it ends up saying stuff like "we'd like permission to share your data with 0 partners". Ever see that?
The fact is most website operators want to use your data for non-essential purposes.
50% that, and 50% that way more companies than you expect are harvesting and profiting from your data.
You need to disclose it in your privacy policy, you need to delete it after a reasonable retention period and you can't use those logs for other purposes like ad targeting, but you don't need a consent banner to track things that you are legitimately using for security purposes.
What makes that a legitimate interest and not advertising?
This part I guess
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.
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…
Just checking, you do know that still counts as tracking and may fall under GDPR rules? GDPR was never just about cookies.
It was never about the cookies themselves. That just happened to be the most common form of tracking in use when the GDPR was originally written. Cookie-less tracking still requires a consent prompt, tracking-less cookies never required one.
> it was never about the cookies themselves.
The ePrivacy directive was about cookies. GDPR is about user consent and data handling - the cookie banner is from the ePrivacy directive.
> Cookie-less tracking still requires a consent prompt, tracking-less cookies never required one.
Where in the GDPR or ePrivacy directive does it say cookie less tracking requires a consent prompt?
And on tracking-less cookies not requiring one - that’s my entire point.
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).
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".
Is there any reason for allowing this tracking browser side besides a little convenience for the web devs?
There is ZERO cost to abusing the user over, and over, and over again by asking for permission to track them.
We shouldn't have the cookie banners at all because NO company should be able to do anything with tracking data. Just ban the use of user data by companies and most of SillyCon Valley's garbage behaviors are fixed.
Similarly, I should never get "terms of service updates" from digital companies because there should be no changes that they can make. You can provide the obvious service that you're providing; you can't aggregate my data for any purpose other than directly serving me; you can't aggregate my data with that of other users; if you retain my data for any other purpose, the government should take percentages of your revenue. I shouldn't have to wade through the BS that the mercenary corporate lawyers cook up to extract value from me.
I have personally never ever had any problems with the cookie banner since Brave deletes them with 100% accuracy, there's sometimes where a site will refuse to function properly, but it's usually sites I don't care about anyway and if I HAVE to get it working I disable brave shield, turn off all tracking, consent and turn the shields back on.
It is unfortunate that most browsers cannot implement this as it goes against what the companies behind the browsers want. Deleting the cookie prompt would stop people from occasionally just accepting all cookies and opting into tracking after getting tired of it.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
As written, this doesn't eliminate cookie banners completely, only if your browser is sending a Do Not Track header or similar. That's unfortunate news if you use fingerprint protection - those send default headers, so you'll still be bombarded with cookie banners. Hopefully existing anti-fingerprinting solutions will offer a "default headers but with Do Not Track" 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
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".
;dr
The "cookie banner" is an interactive method used by "adtech" companies to try to get user consent, as required by EU law. The forced interaction makes this method annoying
Google and other "adtech" companies are lobbying EU Member States to vote against giving users a means to non-interactively deny consent
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.
I would say, we are like 80% there. Yes, there are still some dark patterns employed by cookie banners, trying to trick you into accepting tracking. But they are not too hard to make out. And they can be fixed by tuning the regulation a bit: Require the opt-out to be the first choice and the only one with highlighting.
Ad tracking is not going away tomorrow. If we ever are going to get rid of it, we first need legislation to defang it so it stops being a cash-cow. "Tracking prohibited by default" is a great end-goal, but we are not there yet.
Reading between the lines, it appears that there is some new solution proposed to "automatically communicate your privacy preference". That's nice, but when e.g. the Do Not Track header was tried, it just fell flat. So until this new solution is implemented and adopted, I'll take my websites with a cookie banner, thank you.
It is an unfortunate choice that the campaign obsesses over the cookie banner, instead of trying to actually advance the solution that would make it obsolete.
The fact that we are still talking about this literally a decade after the GDPR was adopted shows that this isn't working. It has turned into a cat-and-mouse game, and the regulators just don't have the manpower to effectively rules-lawyer every tiny change.
> when e.g. the Do Not Track header was tried, it just fell flat.
... because there was no reason to follow it. There was literally zero consequence for ignoring it.
This new proposal makes the Do-Not-Track v2 header legally binding. User sends the header and you still show a consent popup? You're breaking the law, simple as that. No weaseling yourself out of it, a simple screenshot is enough.
Any regulator could build a fully-automated scanner in half a day: ask the local TLD registrar for a mapping of websites to companies, have some script request the page and do a regex search for "cookie" (or use AI if you are feeling fancy), take a screenshot, pass it to an intern to double-check, then automatically send out a €100 fine. Double it every X weeks they haven't fixed it yet. Want to fight it in court? They have screenshot, you lose, now pay.
Does anybody here know of a better solution?
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...
It's just like ADA compliance and trolling lawyers all over again.
However, powerful interest groups like ad companies that profit from your attention (which hysterically virtually powers the Internet today) were able to stop it from happening.
It was debated way back in 2009 when the GDPR was being developed. Iirc the argument was that browsers accept cookies by default so users do not get a fair consent moment. This is obviously easily fixed by regulation requiring browsers to ask users once.
Seems extremely backwards that we chose to forever darken the entire Web browsing experience just so users can "benefit" from a per-site option to let Google profit from them, with virtually zero payoff for the end user (ad relevance?).
P.S. If ad revenue is an essential pillar of Internet survival and fruition, the clear alternative seems to be sharing a fraction of that revenue with the tracked consumer.
This industry is a paperclip maximizer, and it needs to be dealt with accordingly.
but the proper functionality would be no cookies that require consent until consent is given
I guess what I'm saying is, there is no good solution here. I don't want every site I visit to require a usage fee just to browse. Imagine if slashdot turned into WSJ with a paywall for every article.
Kagi already does something like this, and cool - if you use it enough, maybe its worth a subscription. I dont find myself googling (searching) much anymore, so paying to do so just becomes something i need to find a way around. Like API token usage for AI, using it is like making a new recipe in the oven every time. You expect it to work but you have to invest the time and money into the attempt before you can find out the results (whereas you dont have to do this on free chatgpt, google search with ai, etc as comparison). Too much investment without guarantee of results. I'm fine without that guarantee as long as im not wasting my time and money upfront.
Anyways, thanks for letting me rant
Sure, but magazines get a massive portion of their revenue through advertising without trackers. Same with television, or radio, or billboards.
And the ad space isn't exactly very healthy either. Take a large Youtube channel like Linus Tech Tips, for example: AdSense only accounts for 10% of their revenue! Youtube has been drowning people in ads and it still barely pays any money.
I think we should seriously consider the possibility that targeted ads might be less profitable overall. Ad blockers didn't become a thing solely because ads appeared on the web. Ad blockers became popular when ads became obnoxious and privacy-invading. With the current state of the web ad blockers are a hard requirement for a reasonable browsing experience, so the only people seeing ads are the handful of suckers too ignorant to install them.
But if ads aren't as invasive and obnoxious, people would have far fewer reasons to install ad blockers. See for example the Acceptable Ads program of Adblock Plus. If switching to user-respecting ads resulted in a significant portion of people turning off their ad blockers, it could very well result in an increase in ad revenue!
I am kind of wanting to f around and found out. I missed the old internet were most of the big websites are run by hobbyist. I know some of them may not be able to pay the bill without ad. May we can figure out something once we leveled the playing field
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
Google knows if you can set this once it's game over for their adverting business. At least with the cookie banners, there's a possibly you won't refuse every banner.
Especially those banners that only have "Accept" or "More options" with all those checkboxes to clear.
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.
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.
GDPR is not about cookies; it is about tracking. Whether the tracking is done through cookies or through other means makes absolutely no difference.
You can prevent some tracking via your browser, but definitely not all of it.
E.g. storing your precise geolocation for 12 years: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
In 2024 Mozilla acquired Anonym from former Meta executives and decided to introduce PPA: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=privacy+preserving+attribution
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.
1: https://www.cnil.fr/fr/cookie-walls-la-cnil-publie-des-premi... (in french, sorry)
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)
People not reading back on history is still very much a thing.
- for the love of god please do this
- please get rid of every cookie banner on every website on this planet once and for all
- you ll be doing humanity a huge favor
> The solution: automatically communicate your privacy preference
Would be lovely and would happen if it weren't for… wait for it… Google and whole effed up ad-busines:
https://ppc.land/eu-council-drops-cookie-signal-after-google...
F*ck google and other BigTech…
Why the fuck do people have to keep stating the same preference over and over again. This is a hellscape of bad government AND corporate policy colliding.
But we can't have that, can we ? They will lobby to hell and back for that to not happen
At all.
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.
Session cookies for all sites would be fine if passkeys weren't like "We support passkeys. Do you want to use a passkey? Press ok again to use your passkey. Do you consent to using your passkey? Now please authenticate yourself to use the passkey... √ Thank you for using passkeys. Press ok to continue."
I disable cookies for Amazon because I need to login; if a local business wants me to buy from them directly they need to:
1. Not give me a CAPTCHA or cloudflare shit
2. Give me free shipping and a lower price than Amazon minus 5% cashback that I would get on Amazon
3. No registration needed to check out
and I'll buy from the local website. It's really not a high bar, they need to learn to not shoot themselves in the foot.
As for the news websites -- bleh. If they want me to read it, make it easy to read. As in, I click into it, show me the content. If I get a popup, banner, anything that covers up the content, I bounce. I'll get the news from social media anyway. If they'd rather I get it from their news website, they need to learn to not make me bounce.
I'm not opposed to advertising if they want to get revenue from that, but it should not track me, not cover up content, and not load megabytes of JavaScript to do it.
-> not really sensible
instead of building websites and writing laws over the span of decades that just seem to want to ban targeted advertising but don't actually do it. FFS.
1. Making tracking impossible/illegal would NOT kill cookie banners, since you need them to record consent for other purposes as well, such as embedding a video from a third party like YouTube.
2. The GDPR explicitly prohibits site-owners from making cookie banners misleading. The law is already there, it is just not very well enforced.
3. "This results in up to 90% of people saying “YES” – even though only around 3% actually want to be tracked online" This claim is grabbed out of thin air and can be dismissed as such.
4. "The solution: automatically communicate your privacy preference" This is nonsense because it does not actually solve anything, because you need to record consent for a variety of purposes, not just analytics/tracking.
5. Killing tracking would kill the value of ads (since they are not targeted anymore), resulting in a reduced ability for small businesses to advertise and a hugely increased amount of ad spam everywhere. Few targeted ads > Many untargeted ads
Unless you want an internet where advertising is no longer possible, this solves nothing apart from stroking a few activists ego.
https://stateofutopia.com/laws/2/law2.html
This is not a proposal, it is duly ratified international law that applies to "Every Browser Maker making a Browser available anywhere" and "Any site anywhere that receives a valid signal".
The EU Commission had until July 18, 2026 to modify its laws:
>"The site shall not display a banner, modal, interstitial, or other prompt requesting a choice already expressed by the signal. It may optionally provide a “Cookie Settings” or “Privacy Settings” link. This Law overrides all laws requiring such a display. Where any country or supernational entity has a conflicting law, it must rectify the Law within 30 days not to require such notification."
Therefore, insofar as it has not rectified its laws not to require such a notification, the EU Commission is in violation of international law as of 8 days ago.
Under section 7.3, "The State of Utopia may order compliance, require corrective updates, suspend non-compliant distribution, and impose civil penalties. Fines may be levied in any amount for continued non-compliance." so we can fine the EU Commission whatever you guys want ($1 billion? $10 billion? whatever four and a half millennia are worth) and just distribute the collected fines among you all as cash payments.
[1] Here is the announcement of the law 38 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48585778
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.
EDIT: It's obvious that people really hate this option. Maybe too many here have their incomes too closely tied to the metrics that cookies are designed to collect. It could also be that it is an unrealistic option for everything except the most extreme societal changes.
If you are old enough and look back far enough you may remember the time before all this bullshit like I do. Once marketing and advertising get involved and gain power in an organization, things tend to go to shit fast.
> 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.
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)
Cookies were never a problem. Just get rid of the banner.
This other legislation should pass/fail on its own merit.
But of course it’s impossible to convince someone of something when their livelihood depends on their not understanding it.