That's why the more logical and simpler ideas were never on the table.
There was the DNT header, that was a bit to simplistic, but was never implemented https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
The thing people need to understand here is that the annoyance is not due to lack of technical solutions, or regulations forcing something. It is explicitly wanted by the industry so they can maximize the consent rate. The browser solution is probably the best technical/user friendly one, but ad tech/data gathering industry won't have any consent. As they control most of the web, they will never do that
GDPR already mandates that "Refuse non essential" button should be the same size and prominence than the "Accept all" button, every website around the globe does not care (apart from major players like Google, Apple or Amazon) and national data protection authorities absolutely do not care.
We already had one attempt with "Do not track" header, nobody was willing to commit to it because it impaired business. Same would go with OP proposal.
Websites are forcing this banner on us because they are greedy morons that would rather drain our data for money than incite us to pay for their work.
Turn "Do Not Track" on or off
When you browse the web on computers or Android devices, you can send a request to websites not to collect or track your browsing data. It's turned off by default.
However, what happens to your data depends on how a website responds to the request. Many websites will still collect and use your browsing data to improve security, provide content, services, ads and recommendations on their websites, and generate reporting statistics.
Most websites and web services, including Google's, don't change their behavior when they receive a Do Not Track request. Chrome doesn't provide details of which websites and web services respect Do Not Track requests and how websites interpret them.[1]
About the best we have browser side is a mode where all cookies are cleared at browser exit.
But I can't imagine copmanies would want that. They benefit from cookie dialogs fatigue, and for some reason people blame GDPR of all things for surveillance tech being annoying in how they ask for permission.
[1] https://globalprivacycontrol.org/
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control
No. When I see a cookie banner that doesn't have a "Reject all" or at least "Reject non-necessary", I leave the website. When you look into the "Reject..." section, it often contains 1000+ of adtech shit you have to untick individually. Aren't these actually non-compliant with regulations? Makes you think twice about website owners if they choose to sell your data to adtech - seems like law does exactly what it was supposed to do. The problem is adtech which encourages to collect data websites have no business at collecting. If anything, non-compliant sites should be fined into ground and adtech outlawed.
If I could, I'd downvote the article.
The purpose of the laws (GDPR et al) is to give me control over who does what with my data, data about me. The operator of the website is who the law binds. It's not even about the website - if I phoned or emailed, the same laws would apply. You need my explicit consent to process my data in a number of ways that you'd like to, it makes you money, but I don't want you to.
The processors of this data can't make as much money off selling access to data about me, if I have these rights. So they petulantly get in my face as much as possible, via banners on websites, to annoy me and confuse me as to why these banners are even there, and try and trick me into letting them make more money.
The banners, which a browser could block or autofill, are just the surface. And they're an attack surface, so even if we agreed a way for the browser to pass on your preferences (we already did this, it's called the Do-Not-Track or DNT header, and it was a complete failure because website-owners just ignored it), website-owners would add a second layer of "ah, I see you said no automatically, but are you REALLY sure you don't want to let me make more money from your data?"
NOYB is very good for chasing after such charlatans, and forcing companies to obey data protection laws. Here is some of their guidance, and listing of the dark patterns used by non-compliant companies: https://noyb.eu/sites/default/files/2024-07/noyb_Cookie_Repo...
Cookie banner are called cookie banners because they‘re most frequently associated with the opt in for tracking cookies, but this kind of opt in is required for any kind of third party involvement that goes beyond technical necessity.
Your browser has no way to tell what third party present on the site is a technical necessity and which one isn‘t. So you‘d have to tell it - making it part of the site providers problem as well. But this time its worse, because responsibilities are mixed between the site operator and the third party.
Denying would, in many cases, go up to hundreds of yes/no options, with no 'deny all'. Makes getting coerced permission easy, and active denial almost impossible.
Of course, by not tracking, they dont need any of this crap. But surveillance capitalism must continue. Sigh.
Nothing in the GDPR stops websites from honoring "Do not track" and then _not asking_ if it's present. They don't have to ask if they don't track you! They don't have to ask for a technically necessary session cookie that appears after you actively log in!
Websites ask because they want to track you! A 'law targeting browsers' would not help because people would say no to cookies, and then websites would ask about some other way to track you. Because they want to track you.
Here's an even more radical idea: the browser doesn't even ask you this, and by default it just respects the user's privacy and blocks all third party tracking.
Can you imagine an internet where the user is put first?
"Spend Five Minutes in a Menu of Legalese" is not the intended alternative to "Accept All". "Decline All" is! And this is starting to be enforced through the courts, so you're increasingly seeing the "Decline All" option right away. As it should be. https://www.techspot.com/news/108043-german-court-takes-stan...
Of course, also respecting a Do-Not-Track header and avoiding the cookie banner entirely while not tracking the user, would be even better.
If the data is being sold, it should be legally required to word it in that way. If there's even the slightest possibility of your data being leaked to spammers, it should be worded to reflect that.
"Do you consent to us selling your data to any party that wishes to buy your data? Do you consent to the possibility that your data will be used to spam you or steal your identity in the future? Yes/No"
But actually honoring DNT properly would immediately mean no consent banner, but the consent banner is there to fool you into giving up your rights while providing (flimsy) legal cover for the company.
Knives can be used to chop vegetables or stab someone. Don't ban their sale, ban their usage.
If we are going to go down the path of mandating legal liability on software makers of a neutral communication medium, then the EU should just break the commercial web.
Small website operators would still need to be savvy enough to make sure any cookies their website served up were appropriately tagged; this would ultimately come down to ad networks / analytics companies documenting the behavior of the cookies they add.
I'm so cynical now that I can't read articles like this without my first reaction being to look at how it benefits companies that profit from ads.
My two theories here?
1. An attempt to shift liability from companies having to comply with GDPR to browsers having to comply.
2. An attempt to consolidate all cookie consent into the three (?) browser engines we have... so efforts to thwart it can be focused on just those places.
If my 'data' is a no logs vpn address with a privacy hardened browser running in a VM on an isolated VLAN with encrypted DNS then why wouldn't I just laugh and click accept cookies in a sandboxed tab (so said cookies only exist for that tab and are cleared when it is closed.
What youre saying most users dont have this level of privacy by default? Why not?
Browsers are something the end-user installs. Inserting the government into that doesn't make sense.
This sounds like the idea is for the site to add extra metadata that's not there now, about what each cookie does. Which would still involve mandating site owners to do things.
.
Also, both private mode and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... are a thing already, without government meddling.
GDPR article 7, section 4: When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.
basically: A data controller may not refuse service to users who decline consent to processing that is not strictly necessary in order to use the service
anyone who does that is in violation of GDPR
Laws need to be written well to achieve good outcomes. If the law allows for malicious compliance, it is a badly written law.
The sites are just trying to maximize profit, as anyone could predict. So write better laws.
No one wants to be advertised to, but powerful lobbies argue that ending ads will lower consumption and thus harm the economy; and no politician wants to lower GDP.
No one wants to be spied on, but powerful lobbies argue tracking people allow better security; and no politician wants to be soft on crime and terrorism.
We use websites for "free" paying with data. A cynical take on that is "if you are not a customer, you are a product".
If there were no adverts, quite a few things would change:
* much less incentive to track users
* way less distractions
* higher quality content (since it is less about clickbaits and shear volume of visitors)
Yes, it means paying for stuff. Would love to pay per visit or type spent, provided it is easy.
Otherwise how can we explain “please see our privacy policy and send us a sneaker email to opt out” kind of tracking options.
On what basis? What difference is there between regulating website code and browser code? How a website functions and how a browser functions?
If a user sets "allow performance telemetry, deny fingerprinting, ads, tracking" or "decline everything non-vital" once in the browser settings, he should never see a cookie banner ever again - with all of that communicated to the websites by the browser for him, and the websites being obligated to respect the user preferences.
The cookie banner vomit should be reserved only for browsers that don't support that. The fact that this obnoxious behavior somehow became the Internet's default is an atrocity.
Should have been written in the law that it’s a one toggle in browser settings.
If government is going to impose on the internet the least they could do is be competent in what they impose. Not writing laws that waste lifetimes in collective hours a day as every person in Europe deals with multiple of these dialogs a day and thousands a year.
The only ones ignoring it completely are either dodgy companies, or the clueless. The companies exercising malicious compliance are now (quite rightly) increasingly seen as dodgy and need to up their game if they want to become respectable.
The days of not protecting user data are over.
It's the dark patterns and lack of consistency that makes it worse. Some websites even refuse to allow you to reject data collection unless you pay to use their service (i.e. news websites)!
As others have echoed, we just need to make this large data collection illegal.
But companies generally do whatever is in their best interest. I don't know why anyone would expect them to do otherwise with regards to tracking.
the solution is simple, shift the cost of compliance, onto regulators!
it would work like this:
1/ Somewhat competent but disconnected from reality politicians vote for adding yet another rule.
2/ Incompetent, disconnected from reality, so called Experts articulate how to implement the rule.
3/ Estimate costs and report back to clouded brains up there.
4/ Clouded brains but budget wise acute, look at the numbers, and say no way
I bet we would get regulations that would always be welcomed by industries.
We could start by rolling everything back, the "economy", you bet, would finally "recover".
Without incentive to make it right, it can't be a surprise you get what you seeded for.
My instinct is to find the other option is either easy or obfuscated a little bit. But the EU regulation requires that it not take more than 2 clicks to do the other thing.
I thought cookies were kind of evil back in the 1990's and I still think they need to go away entirely.
*Copy URL, close window, open private browsing session, paste*
As an aside, is anyone else getting LLM-writing-style vibes from the linked page, or is that just me?
For example, right now any company can ask for your consent ten times a day until you give up, and once you click “yes” even once, your data begins an eternal journey.
A few months ago, my Samsung TV (which I bought four years ago) suddenly blocked everything and displayed a new agreement on the screen with only two options: Read and Agree. There was no way to use the TV without accepting the agreement.
There's no value you can give DNT that says "you can do your own on-site tracking and telemetry and I accept sharing my data with Sendgrid for your newsletter, but I do not want third-party trackers".
As a practical example: there are news sites that will not play videos if you hit "deny all" because their video host does some viewership analytics. I'm fine with that, but not the 750 other advertisers the news site tries to have me track.
Of course, "deny all" should be an option, "accept all or deny all" isn't control.
For the longest time we had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P as a basis to build on, but that officially died the day Edge became Chromium-based.
Yes, consent fatigue is real and nobody likes these cookie banners. Which is also the exact reason why I think they are important. Making tracking visible to the user is the point. It creates an actual "cost" for tracking by forcing websites to actively ask the user to consent. The moment you hide it in a one-time set-and-forget browser setting is the moment when informed consent dies, tracking becomes invisible, and accountability disappears.
We are also looking at very perverse incentives here: Who controls the biggest browsers? Google's Chromium is basically the engine behind 80% of the browser market right now. Apple and Microsoft aren't exactly neutral parties either. Google is an advertising company, and Apple and Microsoft still have a huge interest in data. The idea that you should trust these parties to implement a "simple" consent system that runs counter to their business model is... optimistic, to put it mildly.
You would also have to trust websites to accurately categorize their cookies. If your cookie preferences are a set-and-forget setting in your browser, are you sure that random website you just visited didn't declare Google Analytics as "essential" for their website to work? Are you going to check?
The blog post also assumes cookie preferences are universal, but perhaps I'm okay with analytics on a random tech blog but absolutely not on a website about medical issues.
The funniest part: The "Do Not Track" signal already exists, and it failed spectacularly. The post even mentions it. DNT was supposed to be exactly this simple, browser-level signal. And websites just ignore it.
Sidenote:
> Imagine if every time you got into your car, you had to manually approve the engine's use of oil, the tires' use of air, and the radio's use of electricity. It’s absurd, right? You’d set your preferences once, and the car would just work.
Yes, absurd. Except that's more or less happening with different features. Every time I start my car, I need to manually disable the speed limit warning because it's annoying, and the lane keep assist because I feel like it is overly aggressive and sometimes genuinely dangerous. Also, the analogy is exceptionally weak. The author compares mechanical necessities (oil, air) with optional data extraction. That's hardly the same thing. Cookies required for basic functionality of websites is usually enabled by default. A more appropriate equivalent would be a popup by the car's dealership asking you to track everywhere you drive, and how fast, and if you looked at some billboards along the way.
It's impossible to write things correctly the first or final time and especially with the interpretation of words changing over time it doesn't matter if you could.
It did not. These practices are illegal under the GDPR, the problem is a chronic lack of enforcement by most national enforcement agencies in all but the most severe cases.
Some are just ineffective but others have gone completely rogue. Swedish Data Protection Authority (DPA) for example takes the position that commercial data brokers like Mrkoll are allowed to publish and sell people's personal information (including your current home address, hello stalkers!) [1] and that this is somehow protected under the pretense of "journalism" [2].
[1] https://mrkoll.se/resultat?n=Otto&c=&min=16&max=120&sex=a&c_...
[2] https://noyb.eu/en/swedish-data-brokers-claim-journalists-le...
Tracking should be considered equivalent to putting an electronic tracking into every customer’s pocket when they visit your brick and mortar store. Then the question of privacy becomes more obvious. It is simply not acceptable to track people this deeply and invade their privacy so much.
So maybe “malicious compliance” is a misnomer. We should just call it "illegal dark pattern".
No!
For crying out loud..... The law says if you want to track me (advertisers take a bow) then in each case, you must have my explicit opt-in permission to do so. And so you should!
Having a browser toggle setting isn't explicit opt-in consent.
There’s probably also a version for the adtech browser somewhere.
It may even be the case that the website pays X company to perform the tracking for their own analytics purposes. Or that it's X company's own freemium model where if you add their tracker they grant you a bunch of cross-site information for free.
Imagine you write a program to do something and it doesn't work at all as expected and at the same time it causes endless annoyance to users.
A law is very similar to a program. It's software for the society. It didn't work and the authors are blaming everybody except themselves.
ChatGPT writing aside, how does the author expect browsers to do this exactly? It's not as if website developers are declaring the purpose of each individual cookie. Browser developers already added a Do Not Track header option and to the surprise of no one, it was a massive failure because websites have every incentive to skirt this stuff.
And today the GDPR law extends much more than cookies, it requires explicit consent for processing personal data in general. Your browser has absolutely no bearing on whether a website's backend will save the pages you visited, the text you entered, your IP address, and whether it shares it with 500 partners or not. This problem fundamentally requires cooperation from website developers and that's why we have the law targeting websites as it is today.
Would love something better than GPC, but in the interim, the EU should start considering it as a proper signal of (lack of) consent, obviating the need for a banner altogether.
I doubt that. People tend to spend their money regardless. Advertising just determines what they spend it on.
While enforcement is effectively nill, they already need to do that according to the actual EU "cookie law" (ePrivacy Directive rather than GDPR). If you set cookies, you have to explain to the user what they're there for.
Hilariously, many websites have no idea what the cookies their trackers set are for, and I've caught a bunch of them use language like "seemingly" and "apparently" when describing what purposes cookies actually serve.
If only browsers gave P3P[1] the attention it deserved. The protocol isn't exactly perfect and the unmistakable footprint of early 2000s XML obsession are there, but it could've prevented cookie banners from ever being accepted if only browsers had designed proper UI around an updated version of the protocol.
The best we have is heuristics content blockers currently use. But heuristics are not good enough for complying to such laws because there's no guarantee they work in 100% of the cases.
It follows that such laws can't target browsers and not websites.
side note: ublock origin has optional filter lists for blocking these banners
None of those cookie popups, though. That's all malicious compliance.
No. The best we have are adblockers and scripts like consent-o-matic.
Clearing cookies does mostly clear cookies, tracking goes far beyond that. Clearing cookies has always been a red herring enabling adtech submarines like "I don’t care about cookies".
chrome://settings/content/siteData
Here's an extension to block at a per-site granularity (despite it saying cookies, it blocks it all including local storage):
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/disable-cookies/lkm...
If I had more time I probably could have figured it out. But unfortunately I’m just running a hobby project and do not have weeks to spend on this. The revenue from the ads is what pays for hosting. I imagine lots of websites are in a similar boat.
I would love if there was a simpler option that could respect people’s privacy more, be less annoying, and that would still allow websites like mine to survive by running ads. Targeting browsers instead of websites could have been that option.
But we see how some companies cough cough Apple cough throw massive hissy fits and tries to find the most minuscule opening on the law
Of course now we also have browsers to worry about as well, being products of the same ad companies that were clogging up the web sites in the first place.
But if cookie laws pushed data collecting web sites to malicious compliance, surely similar laws would do the same to (also data collecting!) browser providers. I’d prefer to avoid inviting browsers to add another layer of bullshit. And there’s no reason it would make web sites behave differently… if I’m a web site bound to comply with laws, I’m probably going to cover my own ass and keep doing what I’m doing without assuming the browser will handle it. Rendering the browser controls redundant and ineffective.
If we want to look for core flaws, look at allowing a handful of giant companies to control the market for personal data — or to traffic in personal data at all.
Ad companies have convinced the whole economic system of the Internet that they are inevitable and essential. They are neither. But we won’t fix that either.
The solution is to get off the damn internet, but short of doing that, I’ll prefer to keep my options open to disable telemetry on my own terms.
Here’s something I would like, though: total sandboxing per web site. Let every domain be alone in its own room of cookies and telemetry. Let it think I only ever visit that site, and optionally always for the first time. I shouldn’t have to blow away all my cookies all the time just to keep Facebook from following me all over the web.
* advertising is profitable for advertisers — they buy ad slots because it brings revenue
* advertising is profitable for publishers — some of the biggest companies in the world (Google, Meta) make most of their revenue from ads
* most people are reluctant to spend money, but they're ok to "spend" their attention and their data
There were multiple attempts with micro-payments and nothing has worked so far. Monthly subscription is preferred by customers and companies, but there are only so many outlets that anyone will subscribe to.
So either: The EU commission is including trackers on their websites. And they should stop OR they acknowledge that it's almost impossible to build a website without some form of tracking that falls under the law, and they should look into the law itself.
So they have work on their plate.
Which doesn't respect the GDPR.
> As an aside, is anyone else getting LLM-writing-style vibes from the linked page, or is that just me?
The multiple 3-item lists with the item's first sentence in bold, the logic not perfectly following from one sentence to another, the numerous comparisons/metaphores, the em dashes, and the general, distinctive tone are certainly clues.
Example: In cycling, they banned narrow handlebars. There's an aero advantage, but it was seen as a safety problem. So cyclists canted their brake hoods way inside, rested their hands on the brake hoods, and got an aero advantage.
And now there's a rule about brake hoods. Laws are meant only be living things that change as society changes, and also change to patch what we might call "exploits." You are perfectly correct: It's never one and done, it's an ongoing process.
Thing is you’re probably right. The modern web is made of middlemen inserting themselves into user experiences to divert and extract revenue from the primary stream between consumer and producer. There’s always room for another layer.
They are under the GDPR.
If you ask for my data, you must do so fairly and tell me what you are using it for.
In the examples you site, if you read the small print "sharing with partners" will go on to say advertising 'letting you know about products and services' and other such shite.
Also, please remember that in Europe there is no such thing as "the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law." The intent of the law IS the law.
OP has a nice idea but hes short on technical details, which in this case is where the devil resides.
Otherwise, you might end up with some unscrollable page because for instance there's a CSS rule that blocks scrolling when the modal is there and restores it when the modal closes and this handling is unfortunately done in JS.
> ‘3. Member States shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information, in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC, inter alia, about the purposes of the processing. 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.’;
Of course this also applies to flash cookies, local storage, and other browser data stores, not just cookies. The legal requirements for data storage that doesn't violate anyone's privacy are a lot looser, though.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
If I go to an ER in a different area (read different medical system) I want my doctor to share personal data. I don't want my doctor to share my personal data with a random doctor in the same medical system unless that other doctor is an expert being consulted on something about me. (that is just being a doctor doesn't give you access to my private information, it needs to be on a need to know).
The above is the obvious case. There are likely other cases that are not obvious where after looking closely private information should be shared. Advertisement is never one of those reasons though, and analytics is only a reason if they anonymize the data with prison terms for mistakes.
Advertising is only used heavily when all products are similar, otherwise the best would naturally rise to the top.
For example, washing powder/liquid is advertised heavily on TV, yet do you really believe one brand of powder/liquid gets your clothes cleaner than any other?
Any website that uses a cookie banner is going above and beyond what they need to do to run a functional website in order to track you.
A funny comparison to me. Actually, I have to manually disable some EU regulated features every time I get into my car. The alerts every time I go 1kmph over the speed limit aren't very relevant for me, and the lane keep alert buzzes as soon as I'm slightly over halfway to the left, but lets me drive along fine if I'm even over the line on the right.
I'd actually like to use both of these, but only if I could calibrate them to my needs.
...
Just like cookie banners.
> […] the Commission is pondering how to tweak the rules to include more exceptions or make sure users can set their preferences on cookies once (for example, in their browser settings) instead of every time they visit a website.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-cookie-law-messed-up-...
Happy to answer questions and clear up misconceptions, especially the one about "giving DNT force of law": we already have Global Privacy Control (GPC), and it's already required in (significant parts of) the US, and it's being enforced.
I can say we've tried really hard to prevent a lot of the malicious user interface issues, and to respect the GPC and DNT signal (no banner pop). We've tried to balance the company's need to keep compliant (because frankly, many of the complaints here about "legalese" aren't just deceptive UI (dark patterns), but done on the advice of counsel), and still operating (marketing needs analytics/ad tracking). And we're concerned about the user experience for what is admittedly an intrusive tool, but required.
(1) I'm not a spokesperson for the company, experiences and opinions are mine.
Legitimate Interest per the law is intended for use cases like, having a list of people who owe you money, or keeping IP address access metrics long enough to use them for anti bot or paywall measures.
If people care about privacy, then over time they will migrate to companies and services that respect their privacy. Government laws are broad based policies that always lack nuance. This is why it is better to let markets drive better outcomes organically.
It's still early days for the GDPR (relatively speaking), but I can see the EU enforcing a particular privacy-related mechanism eventually.
It also doesn't help that DNT is just a boolean signal, it doesn't give you the control over your data that the GDPR demands.
Although, I too had enough of the cookie popups. Let's just ban (and enforce banning) cookie tracking, and be done with this nonsense.
Remove any notion of age blocks that kids just lie about, and let parents determine what is suitable for their kids.
It doesn't mention banners or cookies or that every website needs it.
You want to share it? Get my express consent.
I think we need strong privacy laws, removing the incentive to track, or both, I don't see a technical way around.
Best way to get rid of the cookie banner is to just forbid tracking completely. Given a free choice, how many people actually want to be tracked?
DNT is legally void in several US states because it was enabled by default.
If we do set up a browser-oriented solution, browsers like Firefox and Brave would default to the most privacy-friendly options practical, of course, but they already mostly do that anyway.
To quote Article 4(11) – Definition of Consent
> ‘Consent’ of the data subject means any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her.
Meaning if you force users into pressing a button or let them scroll through 1000 no options, with one easy yes option, you have not collected their free consent. Congrats you broke the law.
Meaning if you just have them click yes, but not informed them about the harmful data collection you did not collect free consent.
The law is pretty clear on that.
It's the same issue as with most EU-wide issues, where there's always countries competing with each other at the benefit of others.
Also GDPR is not exclusive to browsers or internet, it's applicable universally, for both online and offline businesses and processes, which is why it can't and doesn't prescribe exact technical implementation details.
The GDPR doesn't really care about implementations like that.
It took just a pair of ruling that made it clear this illegal pattern was going to actually be cracked down upon, and now these popups are just a small annoyance rather than the absolutely enraging trap that they were at first.
Of course I still wish they were unnecessary, but they serve as a reminder that these websites are still trying to prey upon their visitors.
I default to Deny All, but click on Accept Required when I see it (trusting that it does do what it says it does)
None of any technical ANYTHING matters until we (meaning law and government) inflict truly meaningful consequences. Fines, breaking up companies, perhaps even jail time, etc.
Except that the noble cause has not been achieved but it has made the web worse.
We’re also seeing tracking despite the lack of user consent as well. This could be a fluke but when I make anonymous search on website and switch to another, I’m seeing the product I have just searched in the ads. With all the tracking disabled I mind you.
There is no requirement for 'cookie banners'. You are free to use whatever cookies you want to run your site. HOWEVER, if you are using those cookies to track me (advertisers take a bow) then you need my clear, opt-in informed consent to do so. And so you should!
I continue to be astounded at the ignorance some people have of the GDPR; such a vital privacy law and one that is fundamental to modern data use and respect for the customer.
The other thing is that it benefits those who wish the law would just go away to have it misunderstood this way.
Browser-level permissions are about what the browser is sharing with the website, which is a different thing. For one, the browser sharing information with the website isn’t a blanket permission legally for the website to do anything with that information it likes.
And we don't need a law for that, it is already working. We may need a law to protect that freedom, and for most part, it is on that side as we already have rulings saying that ad blocking is not illegal, and enforcement of browser choice, some of them having built-in blockers.
The level of tracking is insane and would never happen in real life, and companies would be fined to oblivion had they tried, if not forced to close by an angry mob of people.
Disagree. The popup is the enraging problem. It's not a small annoyance. I click them multiple times every single day and it's ludicrous.
I don't need a "reminder". The last thing I want is some "reminder" day after day after day. I want a law that protects consumers in the first place.
Nobody wants this crap.
Sorry for all the companies that like to track personal information, but this is how it has to be (not sorry).
Maybe it will one day lead to elimination of (most) cookies and lead to cleaner browsing experience.
But here's an interesting wrinkle that may illustrate further complexity:
> Essential Only: "Only allow data necessary for websites to function (e.g., keeping me logged in, remembering my shopping cart)."
I would never have called either of those examples "necessary for websites to function". They are both just convenience things, not essential things. So there may be a lot of discussion needed about category definitions here.
Don’t track me means don’t track me, period.
Asking if you could track me etc. regardless is against the spirit of it and simply user hostile.
I understand why companies don’t do it that way. Tracking is worth money and they like money. What I don’t understand is why ordinary people make excuses for them.
Edit: their FF-page says,
Set your preferences once, and let the technology do the rest!
This add-on is built and maintained by workers at Aarhus University in Denmark. We are privacy researchers that got tired of seeing how companies violate the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Because the organisations that enforce the GDPR do not have enough resources, we built this add-on to help them out.
We looked at 680 pop-ups and combined their data processing purposes into 5 categories that you can toggle on or off. Sometimes our categories don't perfectly match those on the website, so then we will choose the more privacy preserving option.
> Explicit consent: Under the GDPR and similar laws, consent must be specific, informed, and an unambiguous, affirmative action from the user. Consent cannot be assumed by a user's continued browsing or inaction, which is what DNT would require.
And way before that (before spyware became common on the web) there was P3P: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P
Now there is Global Privacy Control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Privacy_Control
The problem isn't technical - the problem is that ultimately spyware operators want to track people so it isn't in their interest to support these solutions and won't do so unless they are forced to. Since enforcement is significantly lacking, operators adopt the pragmatic strategy of non-compliance or pseudo-compliance with the current banners.
That way, a misplaced comma or a wonky sentence doesn't allow for easy loopholes that need tighter laws to fix issues.
Now law text will work forever, but this format makes for a very solid foundation.
I absolutely hate unnecessary cookie popups, e.g. when you're already signed in and have accepted privacy policy. Or, when accessing a parcel tracking service or similar.
It's always annoying, but there are clear cases when you don't need to track users and it probably just drives them away or makes them angry.
[1] https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB566/2025.
[2] https://portal.ct.gov/ag/press-releases/2025-press-releases/....
[3] https://www.njconsumeraffairs.gov/ocp/Pages/NJ-Data-Privacy-....
Users often want some level of tracking, like not having to log in to services they use across sites each time.
It's like saying having a secure OS/browser would deprive malware authors of revenue, and thus vulnerabilities should be preserved unless the user explicitly opts into patching them.
(which is also why framing GDPR discussions around cookies misses the point - the point is to determine the user's consent to being tracked regardless of technical ability, whether cookies, IP address, fingerprinting, or even some magic crystal ball)
Then don't visit webpages that do illegal things and are hostile to their users.
> I want a law that protects consumers in the first place.
This is that law.
The problem is that there's a chronic lack of enforcement, so the winning strategy is to breach the regulation. Worst case scenario, you will merely be forced to clean house at some point (but can enjoy the rewards of tracking until then).
Indiscriminate sharing of personal data IS banned under the GDPR.
If you collect personal data, you must only collect it for the stated purpose and can't sell or share it for any other reason.
I continue to be astounded at the ignorance some people have of the GDPR; a vital privacy law and one that is fundamental to modern data use and respect for the customer.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
There is no malicious compliance here, just breaking the law. So if it is the problem of laws that they are broken then according to you all laws are 100% the problem. That stance, IMO, is beyond stupid.
As the name says, it's a General Data Protection Regulation. It covers all types of processing from all types of entities, everything from big tech websites to your local yoga instructor who doesn't have any online presence.
We really need to crack down on stalking-but-automated.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Administrative-court-Cookie-ban...
It's what you would do if you had the crazy idea that a browser should be a client for the user, and only a client for the user. It should do nothing that a user wouldn't want done. The measure of a client's functionality is indistinguishable from the ability of the user to make it conform to the their desires.
Firefox is no better, with their telemetry being opt-out and I believe even if you opt-out some telemetry is sent to let them know you've opted out.
If that was the case, then why does the site from the EU first off track... and secondly why does it use a cookie banner rather than some other solution that would not be malicious compliance with the law?
If there was a solution to having cookies and some other way of informing visitors of it, shouldn't that be demonstrated on the official EU government explaining GDPR?
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...
Can a company go wrong implementing the same approach as https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en uses? Why is that considered malicious compliance with the law?
edit: documentation:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#...
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Resources-Library#tru...
It's actually given in example:
> example.com##+js(trusted-click-element, button.reject-all)
People don't want this, so there is a quick reversion to "pay with your data".
It *IS* illegal under the GDPR.
Article 5(1) requires that personal data shall be (b) collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes ... (c) adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary ...
In plain English, you can't go trawling for personal data.
> Hey, please send the shipment to my customer. No, I can't tell you the address, it's personal data.
Some data sharing will always be necessary. What needs to be banned is the unnecessary sharing, but it's hard to 100% define what counts as necessary
It isn't that this can't be enforced, it just lagged because of the size and changes that this law brought.
> Also, this is a problem that naturally solves itself over time, so no law was ever needed.
How does it solve itself?
> The UX of the web degraded for everyone after GDPR was passed and that I think everyone can agree on.
Due to website operators doing illegal things.
> If people care about privacy, then over time they will migrate to companies and services that respect their privacy.
Why would people care about something they don't know about?
Even when you give them the option to pay, with no ads or tracking, the conversion rate is still around 0.5-1%.
Hard disagree.
Legitimate companies will obey the law; be that the GDPR, anti-corruption or anti-pollution laws to pick a few examples.
The main reason I don’t turn off cookies everywhere is so many sites put my login token in a cookie. Hopefully as a random nonce but even so, it’s using cookies for security.
We are all so used to it is a massive blind spot.
We should move to Fido/webauthn - everywhere. Most all the population has a really impressive Secure Enclave in their pockets
Let’s face it, users don’t want to be tracked, websites want to track. The cookie banners are the middle ground and the law already tries to prevent all those dark patterns to enforce „accept all“.
I remember the early days when the cookie banner on Tumblr forced the user to deselect every single tracker of the hundreds of trackers they listed.
You HOPED that websites' top priority is to provide the best possible experience. The REALITY is that not getting sued is way more important than removing all possible user inconveniences.
Of course, tastes matter. The US is littered with (in real world) advertising banners, my native Poland - even more. But there are quite a few places in the Europe in which people would consider it off putting to use a glowing sign on a historical or otherwise clean design.
So it is about both tastes and regulations.
> most people are reluctant to spend money, but they're ok to "spend" their attention and their data
This is a tricky part. Kind of miss times when we were buying paper newspapers.
But let's take an example - devs were reluctant to pay $ for services. Not everyone and their dog pays for tokens.
Which descriptor do you think is unambiguously violated by making it easier to provide consent than withhold it? To my eyes, both 'freely' and 'informed' are plausibly upheld.
It would be very straightforward to specify that consent and withholding must be equally accessible in the interface, instead of splitting hairs about definitions of "freely given". This is what people refer to when they say the law is poorly written
Still too few just show a simple „Reject All“ button.
And they ignored things like DNT in the browser on purpose.
So if someone made the Internet is worse it’s them and they successfully shifted the blame.
In any case, there is always a difference between the “intent” of a large and diverse body of politicians, and the actual text of a law. Any practical legal system must take it into consideration.
You're assuming people would still have the same amount of money, but for most money is not a given, and people strive to earn money precisely because they want to buy the things they were advertised.
Without the social pressure to acquire things one doesn't need, it's very possible people might simply work less and use that time for other things.
Digital stalking under the disguise of essential functions or calling it just tracking doesn’t do any good.
Some websites even purposely break their functionality when 3rd party cookies are disabled.
So, no, do-not-track is an order, do not stalk me, period.
But there is a dark difference if it is de facto the main source of revenue, or some scammy addition.
In the later case, it can be regulated - the same way as we have safety regulation for food or equipment. In some sense, the analogy is not that far off - the current web is made to be addictive. A lot distractions have well known, negative impact on mental health.
But hey, when the regulators are lawyers who have no idea what cookies and browser are, we get consent forms on every domain visit.
We should however make it easier to pay for content online; let's implement HTTP 402 and integrate it into the users' browser and internet bill to reduce friction. Who wants to create an account and enter their credit card details to read a single article or watch a single video?
A lot of people in the thread are speculating that this approach is illegal, but it seems to have widespread use across the web. Why doesn't DataGrail do this? Was it something requested by advertisers/management that your team pushed back on?
Of course. The law is clear, the intent is clear and the guidelines are clear.
I think the biggest challenge (and the reason why it feels this is everywhere) is because of the handful of "big corporations" controlling the browsers. Neither Apple nor Google have any interest in making tracking opt-in or working to make this into a standard.
In my view, the situation will be greatly improved with policy like the DMA being amplified even further to prevent cartel-like reactions from the FAANGs (whatever the acronym is today). We have a deep "culture difference" with the US, where everyone expects everything to be spelled out for them in the law so they can sue each other into oblivion, but the reality is this doesn't work. We need to reduce the influence of bigger players and install guardrails so it will never be possible again for a single company to have such dramatic influence over the world.
Imagine how many of these consent prompts can be removed if it wasn't for the fact that even loading a Google Font exposes one to a few hundred "partners"?
- The law allows things it shouldn't, or
- The law disallows things it should
And the later gets swept under the rug as "we won't enforce it that way"... and then it winds up getting enforced exactly that way because someone has an agenda, and this is a hammer.
First order of blame goes to the national DPAs for not carrying out their duties.
Second order of blame goes go to whichever EU authority is responsible for penalizing EU member states for non-compliance. There should be serious consequences for non-enforcement like frozen funding. (I don't know what the actual legal process is)
> If people care about privacy, then over time they will migrate to companies and services that respect their privacy.
This is just a libertarian fairy-tale that is designed to sound sensible and rational while being malicious in practice. It exploits information asymmetry, human ignorance, network effects, and our general inability to accurately assess long-term consequences, in order to funnel profits into the hands of the most unscrupulous businesses.
In other words, there's a reason why we have to have regulations that protect people from themselves (and protect well-being of society as a whole).
My need for websites is much less predominant and really I could live without. So of course I bounce when mildly interesting websites ask to host cookies on my browser or want me to create an account and enter my card details.
If one considers maximizing utility the goal of economic science, then this is in fact good, as it redirects me to more useful venues like doing chores I'd been putting off instead of mindlessly scrolling online. Some metrics such as GDP however might suffer.
AFAIK there is no need for a cookie banner for a login token. It is necessary for the functioning of the website.
If it wasn't, the ghoulish masquerade of Corporate Social Responsibility wouldn't be a thing - it in itself a response to Milton Friedman's 1970 article “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” which argued that corporate executives are agents of shareholders and should focus solely on maximizing returns, not social responsibility.
Good question. But there isn't enough information to answer the question. Are these people properly informed about what "tracking" means, or do they think this means companies are passing around their full names and addresses on post-it notes?
> Art 7(3) It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent. [0]
But legal interpretation of GP I believe is reaching the consensus that that phrasing too is broken by that implementation:
> Free and informed consent (Art. 7 GDPR): Consent is valid only if it is freely given. When the option to decline is hidden or unnecessarily cumbersome, the user's choice is affected and consent is no longer "free." [1]
[0] https://gdpr.eu/article-7-how-to-get-consent-to-collect-pers...
[1] https://www.ictrechtswijzer.be/en/complaint-about-cookies-wi...
An approach like this seems ideal to me, the problem is that it's only natively supported in Firefox. Our instructions for Chrome and Edge are basically "install Privacy Badger."
And Safari is the WORST, which as an Apple customer it pains me to say. Not only does the browser not support it, there are ZERO Safari browser extensions, NONE, on ANY platform (mac/iphone/ipad), that you can install that will send a simple GPC signal with the HTTP headers. There is a paid Safari extension on iOS called ChangeTheHeaders that you can configure to send a GPC signal, but come on, you can't ask normal people to buy an app and manually enter a specific HTTP header. (ChangeTheHeaders is made by Jeff Johnson, the same dev as StopTheMadness. I asked him whether he'd consider adding user-friendly GPC signals to that (or any other) plugin and he said it would just be "duplicating functionality" :-/ )
Or, alternatively, you _could_ enforce the law but the resources to do so (people) are no longer available. This happens a lot in the US when the current admin doesn't feel it's important, so doesn't fund the enforcement agencies. And is particularly true more of codes/regulations (I get them confused) than of laws.
So we write a law to say "hey you gotta at least ask before you slap a sticker on, most of the time".
We all know why we didn't just make a sticker proof car. As long as the largest ad company in the world is also the defacto king of the internet we will have these issues.
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. - https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354
> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits.
——
The best I understand it, what this ultimately means is that, yes; if the shareholders hold a vote to say "you need to focus on profits over X thing you're doing now/planning to do", you have to do that, but absent a specific shareholder mandate, you are not in any way obligated to seek profit over all else.
One of the first things people would do if they really had control over their browsers is start blocking Google Ads. Google realized this early on, it's a huge potential threat to their main source of revenue, so they launched Chrome to influence, and eventually dominate, the browser market.
Google doesn't want users to have more control when it threatens their bottom line. It's part of why they've been trying to block ad-blockers.
Now the EU just needs to turn it into an actual liability for corporations. Otherwise it will remain as an additional bit of entropy for tracking.
That websites track you and then sell that data has nothing to do with how long your browser stores cookies. Cookies are just one of many, many ways that websites do tracking.
It is also kind of ironic that the article suggests a technical solution to a legal problem, arguing that a legal solution doesn't work (consent fatigue, DNT, ...) and then suggests legislating on it.
I wasn't implying that ad blockers are a substitute for GDPR, which goes way beyond cookies and things that can be done at the browser level.
Apple has taken steps to make it harder to track, both in iOS apps and in the browser.
It's Google whose revenue depends entirely on surveillance advertising.
The problem is that the technical methods surveillance ad networks use within the browser to track us are features that are useful for many other things.
Trying to redefine this as a technical problem, that can be solved purely by getting the browser makers to change how browsers work, rather than a sociopolitical problem, will fail. Sure, there are more things that Google—and probably Apple—could be doing to protect us, but they can't completely stop the tracking.
The way to stop the tracking is to make laws banning targeted advertising.
Metaphor is incorrect. Tracking you is not essential to the function of the website. A more appropriate one would be:
> Imagine if everytime you got into your car, you had to approve or reject GM tracking your trip, the number of people in the car, recording your conversations, and sharing all of that with 500 indiscriminate partners including your insurance, law enforcement, supermarkets in the area, and why not your spouse or partner.
Or better even
> imagine if every time you entered a physical store they asked for your id and made you sign a contract that allows them to track you and sell that information
The proposal in that article sets a default tracking preference, it's trying to fix a UX issue with more UX. What it's missing is that there's no EU mandated UX. You don't have to show a banner if your cookies are not used to track random people on your website. The reason why it's bad UX is that it's bad on purpose, skimming the line of legality by deploying as many dark patterns as possible to trick you into consenting to your soul and your children's, in a desperate attempt to make that god awful banner go away and finally access your shot of endorphins.
Websites could very well decide to use only non tracking storage by default, and not show you a banner. Or have everything checked off with a single click to make the banner go away. Sending you to a separate page full of checkboxes and legalese is a choice, and a nefarious one, because most people don't want to be tracked.
If anything I think the law should be strengthened: make tracking default-off, and allow users to consent to more if they so wish. Not consenting should be a single, obvious click (or no click at all), rather than a sub menu. Your information should not be shared or sold by default, or even better, not sellable at all.
Which is why this is also illegal in the same jurisdiction.
That's functional, and doesn't need additional consent. The consent for that is given by pressing the login button.
If I buy baby food at Price Chopper, they might send me an email offering me discounts on diapers, but at least I (probably!) won't also get shown such ads literally everywhere I go on the web.
> when the regulators are lawyers who have no idea what cookies and browser are, we get consent forms on every domain visit.
In this case the regulators have considered the problem and implemented the law independent of the used technology. The software developers/companies were the clueless/malicious ones here.
We just refuse to use them, because our politicians either believe that companies should have more rights than we do, or are terrified that if they actually try to enforce the law on them they'll lose out on massive amounts of campaign contributions (whether direct or indirect).
The vast majority of laws are never enforced, so in practice this isn't as absurd as it sounds. It would make people consider what laws they spend time writing.
A web browser is technically incapable, by design, of knowing whether any piece of a website (1) is there for the purpose of having the website actually work, or for the purpose of tagging and tracking the end user. Only the website owner chooses those purposes, and only the website owner is in a position to determine (or maliciously hide) which technologies are being used for which tracking or technical purposes.
(1) Cookie laws apply to: Cookies, gif pixels, JS fingerprints, and any other tehcnical means that can be technically exploited to track an individual
Strictly speaking, that's how civil law works, spelling out explicitly the statutes.
By contrast, common law statutes can be (but are not always), more concise but more vague, putting greater emphasis on the courts to interpret them.
That is one reason USA is more litigious, but it probably isn't the only reason. After all, Germany has the infamous legal bounty hunters (one of the words may be "Abmahnanwälte" but I think there's a different one), and Germany is a civil law country, so USA being common law can't fully explain it.
If you are asking why there isn't a "reject all" button on their webpage then the answer is simple. There is one. The "Accept only essential cookies".
> and secondly why does it use a cookie banner rather than some other solution that would not be malicious compliance with the law?
GDPR (general data protection regulation) is about general data protection, not about technology. It applies the same no matter if you are using cookies or something else.
> Can a company go wrong implementing the same approach as https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en uses? Why is that considered malicious compliance with the law?
The example you've given is an example of compliance since there is a button to reject all tracking cookies. Whenever you read the words malicious compliance within the context of this discussion you can just swap it with the word illegal which is the correct word for the behavior that is being bemoaned here.
So many things are like that now. Like Roku sticks and TVs are subsidized by selling user data. You want to make a Roku competitor that doesn’t spy? Your product will struggle to get on shelves and to stay there, in part because the price for your product will be higher even if you get just as good a price on your components as they do, because you’d have to price them at-cost to match Roku’s pricing. Meanwhile 99% of people looking at the products don’t realize that one’s cheaper than the other because it’s going to spy on them and sell the data.
Ford lost this case because he overtly admitted that he wasn't pursuing profit and because he was deliberately trying to prevent minority shareholders from getting money to start up a rival car company.
If he had just made some vague claim that what he was doing was in the long-term interest of shareholders, he probably would have gotten away with it.
If a company is deciding how to comply with the GDPR on its website, can it go wrong with copying how that site does it? Alternatively, if it tries something that is new, do they risk getting sued by the EU for not following the GDPR?
My claim that it isn't malicious compliance to use cookie consent banners, but rather the least risky approach since that is exactly how europa.eu complies with their own laws.
I've found a high correlation between cookie consent notices and low-signal content, so this strategy has actually saved me a lot of time I would've spent reading/watching something that doesn't help me.
I'm sorry, but does a user who would want this actually exist? This seems like a hypothetical dreamed up by the marketing team to avoid having to accept that a large group of users hate all their tracking shit.
I do not use a popular browser to make HTTP requests or to read HTML. I never see these annoyances. I don't store cookies except for HN and a few other exceptions. Nor do I run Javascript. The annoyances cited in the OP appear to be targeted at people who use certain web browsers that enable these "features" by default
This demonstrates to me that the annoyances are in part contingent on the browser, e.g., browser "features" such as Javascript
Perhaps convincing all www users to use the same small set of Silicon Valley-controlled browsers is prudent according to some Silicon Vallley logic. But when these browsers are all provided by commercial entities that profit from "advertising services" and each has "business" interests^1 that run counter to the interests of some www users,^2 then it makes sense for www users to consider alternatives
1. For example, data collection, surveillance and targeted advertising
2. Thereby prompting government regulation
For example, it is possible to retreive information from websites, e.g. "check a product price or read an article", using software that does not not serve an internet advertising objective. No cookies or Javascript required
You seem to be anti-regulation period.
How about you just enforce consumer protections for everyone? Because that is clearly not the law.
It isn't even compliance, they are just breaking the rules by as much as they think they can get away with and so far, for the most part, they are getting away with it.
--------
[1] Here “legitimate interest” essentially means “we see your preference not to be stalked, but we want to so we are going to make it that bit more faf to opt out, because fuck you and the privacy we lie about caring about”.
Services should be denied the capacity to track and fingerprint, not just told about a preference against it.
DNT will always be an "evil bit", regardless of any law behind it.
The story that advertisers don't know what users selected and that somehow allows them to track the user is disingenous.
Making them part of the "essential" set in cookie banners is a category error. This is an important point, in my opinion, because if we allow websites to get away with saying nonessential cookies are essential, then the more obnoxious cookies people widely object to will just be counted as "essential" to evade people's preferences. Websites seem strongly predisposed to pulling the wool over user's eyes whenever they think they can get away with it, so this category problem is not without meaning.
Cookie banners are perfectly valid solution to the problem. GP originally said that the ideal solution is to avoid cookie banners by not tracking users. Not that if you want to track users there is a better solution than presenting them with a cookie banner.
> If a company is deciding how to comply with the GDPR on its website, can it go wrong with copying how that site does it?
No, because that is how it is spelled out in the law. Rejecting tracking must be as simple as accepting it. On the EU website both those options are presented in a clear way.
> My claim that it isn't malicious compliance to use cookie consent banners, but rather the least risky approach since that is exactly how europa.eu complies with their own laws.
There is no malicious compliance. If it is done as it is done on the EU site then it is compliant. If it isn't then it is illegal. Malicious compliance means that the letter of the law is strictly followed so to cause/do something not intended by the law. In case of hiding the reject button, that is illegal.
What changed the most with GDPR is that enforcement now has teeth. Not as big teeth as say, NIS2, which actually has executives more concerned than middle level about being compliant, but still big.
Our primary job is to make our customers compliant, so we try to "push them into the valley of success". That means GPC and DNT "do the right thing" by default, no deceptive design (dark patterns), etc.
You can't have laws that dictate the desired outcome in broad terms and trust companies to implement in good faith. Not when they have a direct financial incentive to implement it as obtusely as possible.
It's really unfortunately that in the public's eye the legislative attempt to steer towards a positive outcome is seen as the cause of the pain.
There's also a basic imbalance of power -- for instance, if you don't fill out the paperwork to get medical care that says (1) everybody who could possibly have a reason to access your data can, and (2) we're going to do that at a cost 1000x more than just leaving all the paperwork out on the curb you don't get medical care.
People don't really real all those clickwrap licenses, I mean, Sony makes you scroll to the bottom of a 50 page contract just to play a video game.
No, they overwhelmingly are not. When given the opportunity to not pay, and do so anonymously (no social shame), the actual pay rates drop to the 1-5% range.
This is a clear trend from thousands of creators who give simple payment options to those who wish to support them directly. The conversion rates from "ad-supported (but blocked)" to "paying member" are usually around 5% of the active audience.
The numbers are atrocious despite the deafening virtue signalling of comment sections ("I always pay creators to support them!")
I don't think that's the case. A number of people downthread are quite explicit that they find being asked at all annoying and don't think websites should be allowed to throw up cookie banners all the time.
This combined with governments ignoring it, and actively enforcing GPC... it's questionable whether compliance is necessary (I still suggest treating it the same as a GPC signal).
But future work and effort should be put towards the GPC signal.
But to the flights example, I was just looking for flights starting at Google Flights, which doesn't have cookie banners, and the two sites I went to for booking also did not have cookie banners.
Actually, you don't event need parameters to track, you could just use the IP of the requester and for instance do some IP geolocation.
To be real though I'm sure that many sites would not want this because they rely on GDPR fatigue and users to just accept instead of taking a few seconds to opt-out.
A browser doesn't have that simple test. It can be used to do anything.
Therefore, the commercial website made by someone who chose to make it commercial needs to be regulated, as opposed to trying to regulate every browser.
(As an aside, you likely don't know how many browsers exist.)
This is a fiction and just an excuse conservative justices use to make conservative rulings when they don't like a law.
They are perfectly fine to abandon the text of the law whenever it doesn't move forward a conservative agenda. The shining example of this is the voting rights act. Something never amended or repealed by congress but slowly dismantled by the court counter to both the intent and the text of the law.
And if you don't believe me, I suggest reading over the Shelby County v. Holder [1] decision because they put it in black and white.
> Nearly 50 years later, they are still in effect; indeed, they have been made more stringent, and are now scheduled to last until 2031. There is no denying, however, that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.
IE "We know the law says this, and it's still supposed to be in effect. But we don't like what it does so we are canceling it based on census data".
As that will erode most worth derived from tracking, sensible operators will decide to stop annoying users and just ditch the tracking altogether. Or so I hope. I wouldn't know, as Brave does a pretty good job of hiding cookie banners in the mean-time.
That law has "discovered" that these rules for these sites suck because nobody wants to sit and decide what they want on a site by site basis and thus the "just get out of my face" kinda clicking and annoyance works.
The idea that just visiting any given site I visit means I have to make some legal agreement makes no sense.
And it's all because the law was written by lawyers who care less about user experience or privacy than the companies that have to enforce it.
Take Apple for example, it takes years just to complete a single “unlawful termination” suit, and it would be … decades before the world can equalise the damage from their App Store practices. And all while this is going on, corps are pouring huge amount of money into lobbying so by the end they nerf or even reverse the very policy that keeps them accountable.
Apple engages in “privacy washing” - they take steps in the name of privacy when it disadvantages their competitors. At the same time, Apple has no problem collecting say Spotlight and Safari search terms … or “features” from Photos etc.
I agree that ads as a monetisation channel were a mistake. But beyond that, privacy is a human right and should be applied without exception.
If people actually didn't value the content, they wouldn't devote their time to it. I don't know anyone who regularly devotes hours a day to something they get zero value from...
More generally, I actually did organically notice the massive increase in "Reject all" buttons and found out about these court decisions myself some time ago. Certainly a small win for the internet, although it should not have taken 9 years(!) from the implementation of GDPR for these violations of it to be cracked down on.
You can login and buy things. But how do you choose whether the shop can kleep track of what you have bought to suggest rebuying or for you to keep a shoopping list. Requestion those is more than login.
Remember how many members of parliaments have a legal background. That's not a coincidence. It is safe to assume laws are deliberately written badly to create more work for their caste.
Programming your computer to automatically click "yes" sounds like affirmatively giving consent to all popups to me. The standard for consent here is lower than for things like sex.
So Chrome is non-commercial? Edge is non-commercial?
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Those browsers exist specifically for the commercial advantage they bring the corporations that create them.
And please don't make asides that make assumptions about my knowledge. You might want to take a look at the HN guidelines.
If there is, I'll be the first to say they shouldn't be doing that, and I would definitely prefer them not to be collecting it in the first place, but there are different kinds and purposes of data collection.
I'm willing to accept that some amount of personal data is being sold less, at least by some market participants. I'm still not sure how I could possibly measure even the tiniest improvement in my life, though.
And before someone says that it will hamper innovation, I used to live in China and talk to investors often, they would always stress that for every guy with a billion who can't play by the rules there's a thousand guys with a million who have no problem taking the market share, that's hardly an issue
If you read GDPR in it's complete form [1], there are 173 paragraphs before the actual law begins at CHAPTER I, almost half way down the page. Those are the reasons why the law was created, what's it trying to achieve, how it is intended to work, responsibilities of govenrnments, etc.
The EU provided us the spirit of the law - in writing.
There are several sites I would not hesitate to pay for, but the most that will net me is generally "content with invasive tracking". Sometimes with no ads and sometimes with "fewer ads". But in either case, still a non-starter because it's still capturing the same data about me and sharing it.
They obviously looked at the alternatives and decided that the benefits of cookies or the cost of compliance is bad enough to allow for this crappy experience. And they all pretty much decided across the board.
So what problem is this cookie crap trying to solve? No one asked for it, no one wants to comply and now we're just making the web worse off as a result.
> IMY’s practice of simply “forwarding” complaints.
> The IMY’s way of dealing with complaints since the Supreme Administrative Court ruling is to attach an “appeal form” to their (non-)decisions. But it still doesn’t investigate the complaints. Instead, the authority simply forwards the complaint to the entity that illegally processes personal data and then immediately closes the case. This also happened in the case preceding noyb’s current legal action against the IMY. After a data subject filed a complaint regarding a recorded phone call, the authority forwarded it to the respondent without investigating.
[3] https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-takes-swedish-dpa-court-refusing-pro...
Just to reiterate, I'm not religious about this practice. If I need to click a cookie banner to book a plane ticket, so be it.
I just treat cookie banners as a strong negative signal.
Before the law most didn’t even know how much the get tracked.
And you misunderstand something, the law doesn’t improve you life it prevents it from getting worse.
Just look what happens when companies know everything about you
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/loose-flapping-ends/#luig...
Exploitation beyond your wildest nightmares.
That’s what those laws try to protect you from
Law making is a way of predicting the future and setting up incentives to achieve a goal. You need to foresee what can go wrong, talk to incumbents and anticipate the response. It's a technical matter and this has been a debacle.
It's useless to put the blame in the advertisers. Even if they're evil, that doesn't make the situation any better for the public.
This is an excellent analogy of the problem!
>"Yet, that’s exactly what we do online. We are asked the same questions, by every single website, every single day. This approach is broken for three simple reasons:
Consent Fatigue is Real: We're so bombarded with these requests that they’ve become meaningless. The banners are an obstacle to be cleared, not a choice to be considered. True consent requires a conscious, informed decision, not an exasperated click to get the pop-up out of the way."
Consent Fatigue -- That phrase is going into my 2025 lexicon! I love it! (Well, the phrase itself, not what it stands for! You know, the words, not the meaning -- the symbol, not the referent! :-) )
Now I like the article's ideas and all (good ideas, very thought provoking, etc., etc.) -- but if cookie consent is delegated to people's browsers, then what if a court case comes up where someone is being sued for a cookie they agreed to, they're asked in court if they agreed to the cookie, and they respond with something like the following:
"No Your Honor, I personally did not agree to that! The browser agreed to it! The browser is guilty, not me!"
:-)
(The same problem could occur outside of browsers, with AI's, if they are acting on behalf of someone... or chain of other AI's...)
Anyway, great article!
Unfortunately, I don't actually think people realize the law is on their side here. My girlfriend never clicked "Reject All" until I told her to because she thought something wouldn't work if she did that!
We put a lot of safeguards, exception handling and all kind of measures to control errors.
Targeted ads generally bring in 3x the revenue of generic ads. Personally speaking, I'd rather have 1/3rd the ads on a page and allow my data to be tracked. I don't mind my data being tracked, and I'd rather see ads for keyboards / mens clothes (what I buy) than diapers / ladies shoes (who knows what tomorrow holds, but this is not what I'm buying at the moment).
What I’m 100% sure of is that the UX of the web has been made worse, and I don’t think it’s sufficiently acknowledged.
I mean... uh.
If the world would only consist of people who want to cooperate and don't have malicious intentions, then WE WOULDN'T NEED THE LAW AT ALL.
The law exists BECASUE OF the people who don't want to comply. So if the law doesn't control those people who don't want to comply, then the problem is with the law.
Because if we're saying that the problem is with the people, then the discussion is pointless like a black hole.
Do any browsers support running a minified LLM on device through an extension?
Training an LLM to reject optional cookies (or better yet, fuck with the telemetry) would seem highly doable nowadays.
2. Contextual ads are not targeted and would not be showing you adverts for diapers or ladies shoes- unless you are reading about diapers or ladies shoes.
Edit: I just tried the flight ordering flow again (starting at google.com/flights) in a private/incognito tab, and did not encounter any cookie banners.
Nope. Murder is an action after which the victim can not make any more actions. It would be like saying "don't go to the bakery where they spit in your food and slap you in the face every time you order something". You are enraged by the behavior of the websites you visit and you still keep going there every day. Either you are a masochist or "voting with your wallet" or, in this instance with you attention, doesn't really work. Why do you give your attention to those that treat you like shit?
> How about you just enforce consumer protections for everyone?
They are. What gave you the idea they aren't? Because some pages still behave illegally? You understand that murder still happens?
> Because that is clearly not the law.
Do you know anything about GDPR? Because it seems that you do not. Could you point to the text of the regulation that you object to? I'll wait but I'm sure I'll be waiting for godot here.
If they are showing you a toggle and calling it for "legitimate interest", they are most likely lying.
They love to put cookies under "performance and enhancements" as if that isn't bullshit as well.
All legitimate interest cookies are in the greyed out toggle for "required cookies".
By law, you can decline all and the site should still work fine, which again means they won't allow you to turn off actually needed cookies.
This is a critical failure point which should get more attention. Laws (and regulations) are like computer code in some key ways. Early computer code was written assuming it would be run by experts in trusted, benign environments that were relatively fixed in size and complexity. Our legislative law-making structures were created with similar assumptions. As the world changed, code changed but law-making structures didn't.
At a minimum, while being drafted laws should be subject to independent red-teaming and penetration testing to A) Assess their ability to actually accomplish their stated intent over time in the real world, and B) Surface likely unintended perverse consequences. Of course, that still wouldn't solve the issue of intentional weakening of laws with vague terminology, incomplete scoping, inserting loopholes, exceptions, etc by special-interest-driven legislators.
Sadly, these days I think intentional nerfing of laws during drafting is the biggest cause of 'bad laws'. But at least the red-teaming concept might prevent some unintended bugs on top of lobbyist-driven nerfing.
How else should we view them? Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, probably a duck.
Nobody justified the behavior, only stated that corporations have proven over time to generally seek profits over all else. They provide legal cover to bad-faith actions. That wasn't the original intention, but it is absolutely the current state of the world.
You download a specific tool which only has the purpose of collecting your local error reports and sending them to Microsoft". Later on that tool became just a button in your control panel that submitted all your local errors and told you if those errors had an already developed solution.
That's how they did all their error telemetry until like late XP era, and it worked just fine.
All the people insisting that they need* this telemetry is also horse shit. Companies are demonstrably not producing better and more bug fixed software, and demonstrably are not using that data to make serious improvements, but demonstrably ARE using that data to choose where to focus dark pattern and other sales funnel based efforts.
If Unity and Unreal and GPU drivers can ask me "Do you want to send this error report" with a default no, nobody else has any excuse.
Even now, a significant amount of companies use the system of "Please upload your error log and the output of this command to this forum" as their bug report solution and it works just fine if that company actually intends to fix bugs.
The solution is not to turn your software into spyware. Stop being entitled. You don't have a right for me to QA your software for you, that's your job. Even with all this telemetry, companies only fix the most common and most obvious bugs anyway, so the perfect telemetry is utterly useless. Those bugs would have surfaced anyway.
Developers in the 80s did not need telemetry to get bug reports and fix things and release patches. Learn some history of your profession people.
Has throwing a hundred thousand bugs onto your sprint backlog actually helped anyone develop better software? No. Meanwhile it has exposed all your customers and users to predatory bullshit from your marketing and sales departments, and enabled your worst product managers to optimize hostility and extraction.
A "loophole" is only a "loophole" to someone who agrees with yours. And I say it as someone who agrees in this particular instance.
And this, plus the fact that it's so abstract and opaque what the negative consequences of that spying are, is a huge part of the problem with all of it.
We need better regulations on this, but sadly, even before the recent fascist takeover, the regulators have been largely asleep at the wheel for decades.
It seems like web browsers were developed in a pre-surveillance capitalism world
Literally what a corporation is.
This is capitalism mate. People will do basically anything with the "for the company" excuse. If they don't, they will be out of a job and eventually starve.
Laws are the only things that can limit corporations. Without those we'd still have children working, 14 hour shifts and no weekends.
> track of what you have bought to suggest rebuying
You know what you sold, no need to track user behaviour.
California's "Opt Me Out Act" (AB 566) requires that by January 1, 2027, internet browsers must provide a built-in, easy-to-use setting that allows users to send an opt-out preference signal, such as Global Privacy Control.
The sane way to keep the cart contents server-side still involves a cookie on the client.
It's possible to do it in a glitchy way server-side-only, but if that makes a cookie stop being essential then by that definition there's no such thing as an essential cookie.
Such a definition is a bad definition.
Whereas you get publicly-traded companies and the primary shareholders are investment funds, whose managers get bonuses based on short-term results and who may not be in the same job or having the fund hold the same companies in as little as a year from now. So their incentive is to have companies squeeze customers for short-term gains and then choose the right time to pawn the shares off on some bag holders who see strong recent numbers and don't realize what that strategy does to the company's long-term prospects.
GDPR only uses the word cookies once and it comes immediately after the phrase "such as", i.e. it's a non-exhaustive list of examples of ways that you could track someone.
Isn't this the other way around? If you cite "the spirit of the law" then you're ignoring the text in order to do whatever you want.
Finding a "conservative" judge who does the latter is evidence that the particular judge is hypocrite rather than any argument that ignoring what the law actually says is the right thing to do.
But you also picked kind of a bad example, because that wasn't a case about how to interpret the law, it was about whether the law was unconstitutional.
Investigating murders is enforceable. If law enforcement isn't doing their job then that is a different problem. By virtue of being on the Internet, tracking cookies span many legal jurisdictions (even ones outside of the EU that never agreed to GDPR) and therefore run into all sorts of different legal obstacles. Apples and oranges and all that.
> This is just a libertarian fairy-tale that is designed to sound sensible and rational while being malicious in practice. It exploits information asymmetry, human ignorance, network effects, and our general inability to accurately assess long-term consequences, in order to funnel profits into the hands of the most unscrupulous businesses.
No, it allows people to be adults and vote with their feet. We do this all the time in many other areas and it works. (Exactly what the free market is based on) This is not to say that there shouldn't be any privacy and anti-spam laws, but when it comes to allowing marketing/advertising the trade-off has been well understood for some time. We are all funneling a lot of profits into companies that provide software to serve up the cookie banner warnings now and the advertisers still end up getting lots of people's data. A poorly designed law is a bad law. Legally requiring consent upfront and the ramifications of that decision should have been thought through much more thoroughly.
How long have these laws been out and we are still dealing with these issues. They seem to have gotten worse, not better.
> How does it solve itself?
People build services that don't track others and people pay for those services. It's pretty simple.
> Due to website operators doing illegal things.
If it was so illegal it would be stopped, but apparently businesses are indeed complying with the law.
> Why would people care about something they don't know about?
It's well known that cookies track you across sites and some people choose not to use those sites. The sites are required to disclose this information, so users are definitely aware.
This conversation is about making it mandatory for browsers to automatically communicate consent so that we're not bombarded with visual requests for consent.
One way to do that is to interpret the law strictly according to the text, or in the case of ambiguity to choose the interpretation that benefits the accused rather than the government. Then you could just read the law to know if it prohibits what you want to do, because unless it unambiguously does, then it doesn't. And then if the government doesn't like it once they see someone doing that, it's up to them to change the law.
Another is to give people a way to get clarification ahead of time. This is called advisory opinions and governments generally hate them because as soon as you allow it, the government is going to be absolutely swamped with requests for clarification because everybody wants to pre-clear everything they're going to do rather than take the risk of getting punished for doing something without clearing it. But in order for this to work, getting a clarification has to be cheap, because "pay a million dollars for an advisory opinion to avoid the risk of a million dollar fine" isn't a real solution to the problem of people getting punished when the law is unclear.
So the first one is actually better, the only "problem" with it is that you need the government to be paying attention and promptly rework the law when it isn't having the intended effect, otherwise you'll have people complaining about it because in the meantime there is a dumb law on the books. But if your government is bad at making good laws then you're going to have a bad time no matter what.
Moreover, consent by law tends to need to be specific: you give consent for the specific purpose to the specific company. Of course there are and should be ways to convey denial of consent by "do not track" style headers, but I am not sure this can solve all the issues.
I think blaming the law is bullshit. When a website throws a cookie popup obstructing you from using it, it is because they really want you to click on "accept all". There is no other reason to do this. It is terrible UX and not all websites do this. It is a totally conscious and intentional decision.
All the paywalled news agencies want a monthly subscription. But I, as someone who doesn't like getting all their news from a single source, am not interested in signing up for news subscriptions because the cost would pile up fast, and to be honest I don't read that many news articles in a given month.
I think we need some kind of usage based billing system where participating outlets can set a price per article, and users can agree to be billed for that article when they go to view it.
I am not sure what OP asks. They should make their request more specific, what they want evidence for.
The intent was nice, but the ask from the article is essentially asking browsers to implement uBlock Origin built-in and expect Google to just comply without pushback.
Unlike to happen because the ones that got us the current law, the ones that make the browsers, and the ones that make money from the ads (cookies == ads) are all the same companies.
Sure, some of you are just so good and nice that you're going to spend all of your time trying to better your fellow man no matter the incentives. The rest of us are spending our time and energy trying to better ourselves. It's better for everyone if the rules of the game are set up so those actions create positive externalities.
On the other hand, there is the issue how the intent of laws (which were often passed by highly incompetent politicians, in particular when IT topics are involved) is to be interpreted.
A partial solution to this problem is: write laws in a way that need a lot less clarification because there is rarely a need for it because the laws are thought out so well.
But in the absence of that? I appreciate at least being asked for my consent so that I can press the "I do not consent to being tracked" button. It shouldn't exist in the first place, but since these websites are unwilling to just not spy on people, this seems like the next best thing.
(and frankly, the number of users that actively want to consent to this is essentially zero)
I always constent to cookie popups so the number can not be 0.
1. The identity token (tracking cookie) is a unique number the 400 websites that have 1x1 pixels on the site dump on my browser. They don’t need to know I might be bob smith, Ford car owner, likes dogs and so on. But they want to so they can know if it’s worth bidding on an ad This is the egregious cookie. It’s mostly being replaced by the facebook cookie because hell there are only a couple of places running ad auctions but …
2. After I do actually verify I am Bob Smith, the session cookie arrives and is hilariously trusted for every request for the next 8 hours.
The thing is we don’t do this for stuff we care about - like bank accounts.
So presumably the total value of every site that uses session cookies is less than the amount in my checking account. Which says something …
But yes, I think your take is more realistic as any measure that allows rapid changes also allows willful politics to rapidly make a mess.
Well, there's little for websites to respect if we don't ensure popular commercial browsers have the capability to send the necessary headers, and that these headers actually reflect user choices, even if the corporations behind them don't want to.
So it's not pointless at all. It's rather quite an important half of the equation. How is it going to work at all without that?
Its not hard when it comes to any website of note, large companies can't easily hide what their computers are doing really, if they have code that tracks people it is gonna be found.
Yes, I know that breaking the law is illegal, but laws only matter insofar as they can be enforced and are enforced.
I started to write this comment meaning to add that Firefox does it all by itself now, but I just read that such feature "is not currently available anymore".
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cookie-banner-reduction
Does anyone know what happened after years of development, before I delve into their Bugzilla to find out?
As far as malicious/non-compliant websites go, cookie banners don’t make that issue better or worse. They can lie just as easily with a banner. In fact this implementation makes it easier as no one needs to build those ugly banners anymore. (Devastating for the pop up industry though.)
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
Yes US sites will be doing that
Now I'm left wondering why enforcement was supposedly so hard. Seems like shooting fish in a barrel, especially given that some very large websites were in clear violation of this article
So some websites actually require an accept/reject, and don't work if just visually hiding the banner, which is what this does.
First, I, the user, am requesting to open the website. It's not the website imposing on me. My browser, which supposedly is under my control, is what forwards all the data.
Second, there is absolutely no way to know whether the website actually does what it says based on the cookie pop up. If it's a website based outside the EU then there's no way to enforce this cookie pop up.
But if the browser handles this, then there is a way to enforce it. Of course, the downside there is that the website will then use other means to potentially collect the data, meaning that you still need the law to limit such data collection.
People respond to this with "but you don't have to track people to show them ads!" But that's naive and shows that you really haven't thought it through. What's the value of an ad to you in Chinese? Russian? Japanese? Latvian?
The answer is zero. You would constantly get ads that are completely irrelevant to you and the company that bought advertising. Even with today's tracking this still happens a lot. I still ads every week that are in a language I do not understand.
Take your Google Fonts example - would that even exist if it wasn't for the "exposed to 100 partners" part? Quite possibly not.
Yes, that is precisely the problem with GDPR, too. Enforcement is supposed to be carried out by national Data Protection Authorities but they just don't investigate. I've reported some clear cut violations and they never followed up on anything.
Swedish one is even being taken to court for completely neglecting their duties: https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-takes-swedish-dpa-court-refusing-pro...
> By virtue of being on the Internet, tracking cookies span many legal jurisdictions (even ones outside of the EU that never agreed to GDPR) and therefore run into all sorts of different legal obstacles.
It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant to the general enforcement issue. Most DPAs seem to be failing to enforce even the simplest of cases. Let's chat about the edge cases and jurisdiction when the clear cut cases are being taken care of reliably.
Definitely the spirit of it, though some claim not the letter or it due to loopholes.
> The decline button means decline all.
It certainly should, but I never trust it does (with other dark patterns on show I'm all out of benefit-of-the-doubt) and go into to "details" to look for objection toggles. Not that I particularly trust those anyway, but that is a different niggle!
Who are "they"? The law hasn't changed, it's enforcement that is changing, albeit very slowly.
There are so many institutions that can be rightfully blamed - chiefly the DPAs and the national governments, but your continued insistence on blaming the lawmakers makes no sense. The law is clear, it's just not being enforced.
Of course advertisers deserve all this blame too, but their blame is irrelevant when discussing enforcement. I don't expect them to stop any more than I expect a serial killer to turn themselves in. This is still a failure of the institutions.