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

> The problem here is not the law

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"?

> Neither Apple nor Google have any interest in making tracking opt-in or working to make this into a standard.

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.

> everyone expects everything to be spelled out for them

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.

My point was that the approach is not effectual when the guilty party is a corporation with near infinite resources.

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 has taken steps

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.

Is there any actual evidence that Apple is collecting this information and either using it for tracking purposes, or selling it to others who do? As opposed to processing it in aggregate to improve their services?

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 don’t think they’re selling it (at least that) but it’s spotlight and the browser … exactly where one tends to type sensitive things. It’s unsettling to know everything I typed becomes a dataset to circulate all divisions within a big corp for years to come, for data analysis, unit tests and who knows what else.

The biggest challenge is that websites wouldn't be able to pay the bills if they didn't track you (show you ads). The price we would pay for that is an open and freely accessible internet. Websites like YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit would likely never have been as successful if there wasn't the ad market (even if those websites don't use that, the existence of such a possible pivot still adds to the value of such a site for investors).

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.