Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites

Not a radical idea. The EU is already working on it.

> […] 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-...

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The alternative is that they tweak the laws without much thought...

DNT header already does this. Explicit denial of consent. Reaches their servers before everything else so they have no excuse and zero room for maneuvering.

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.

Isn’t that the current status quo?

The GDPR has over 100k words, and those words are certainly less than 0.01% of the thought that has gone into this problem.

The fact that it was turned on by default in edge really hurt it as an argument under these laws, because it then turned into a 'well we don't know the user actually selected this' thing. Making it explicitly have the force of law regardless would still be a good thing, though.

They can't. The website may very well do the opposite of the preference DNT signals. Meanwhile, proving in a court of law that the tracking still happens will be hard.

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.

DNT is considered deprecated in favor of GPC, which has legal backing in places with internet privacy laws. Funnily, Chrome still supports DNT but you need an extension to send a GPC header. Almost like the advertisement company wouldn't want people enabling legal privacy protections.

No, this wrong. The law says that by default you can't process personal data, unless the user gave consent. That setting matched both the expectation of users and the default as specified by the law.

The story that advertisers don't know what users selected and that somehow allows them to track the user is disingenous.

GPC compliance is already the law in California. I don’t know why the EU has been so slow at making it legally binding. That said, existing cookie popups that don’t have “Reject All” as prominently placed as “Accept All” are already illegal but widespread, in no small part due to deliberate sabotage by the Irish DPA, so don’t expect GPC compliance to fare any better until consumer rights associations like NOYB.eu are allowed to initiate direct enforcement actions.

Agile laws might not be so terrible.

Counteropinion: agile laws would be absolutely terrible. Either people wouldn't take them seriously because they're going to change in a few minutes anyway, or people would take them seriously and be bound by law by the equivalent of late-night untested code that seemed like it should work.

In Germany, DNT is legally binding, but GPC is not.

It doesn't allow them to track, but it does allow them to more convincingly argue that they can nag them about it (I think some regulators in some EU countries have rejected this, but I don't think this is universal). i.e. it makes it ineffective as a means of stopping the annoying pop-ups. Because the companies are basically belligerent about it there needs to be a clear declaration of 'if this header is set you may not track _and_ you may not bug the user about it'

It’s not just corporations. Look how much tracking nonsense goes into a recipe blog.

Plus, all GPC extensions advertised by the offical GPC pack other unsolicited privacy features and freemium models. I ended up building an extension https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gpc-enabler/ilknagn...

How do you deny the capacity to fingerprint? That's basically disabling JavaScript.

Essentially the same way uBlock Origin worked. A global list of offenders to block so that Javascript won't be loaded at all.

Asking browsers to implement uBlock Origin natively tho...

How are they supposed to ask for consent then?

Adding a different web page-resident language?

If the user has already indicated that they don't consent by setting the header, you don't ask. If they want to change, make it available as a setting.

(and frankly, the number of users that actively want to consent to this is essentially zero)

What if the user doesn't know they have that setting enabled. Or they enabled it to block some other company than your own.

I always constent to cookie popups so the number can not be 0.

Hence why I think the default hurt the initiative. And the header could be set on a per-domain basis, if you wanted that for some reason. I'm curious, why do you consent on such pop-ups?

Charitable interpretation of their comment: Law is implemented and then rapidly improved upon.

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.

> They can't. The website may very well do the opposite of the preference DNT signals. Meanwhile, proving in a court of law that the tracking still happens will be hard.

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.

I always consent as well. They can show much more relevant ads when you consent to cookies. If I block cookies I get generic ads about stuff I don't care about.

The EU is already working on it? You have a strange definition of "already" ;)

EU law typically has a lead time of at least two years.