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

The problem here is not the law, but malicious compliance by websites that don't want to give up tracking.

"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.

Tracking by default is not an acceptable solution, so I would say respecting the Do-Not-Track header must be mandatory and enforced by laws and percentage of global revenue fines.

That wouldn’t help much in terms of annoyance, because you need the option of per-site or per-service opting-in to tracking cookies (like “remember me” checkboxes and similar functionality), and then you can’t really prevent web pages showing a banner offering that opt-in option. It wouldn’t be exactly the same as today’s cookie banners, but websites would made it similarly annoying.

We cannot rule by law if the websites don’t want to abide by the rule of law.

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.

Kinda… but between credit cards (and any cards serviced by them—debit cards aren’t safe) and widespread facial recognition with cameras everywhere in stores these days, and things like “loyalty cards” being required to just get what should be normal prices on things, we’re pretty heavily tracked in physical space now, too. People just don’t realize how much, and don’t see this stuff being sold and aggregated then re-sold.

We really need to crack down on stalking-but-automated.