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Comment by contravariant | Hacker News Reader

It's too bad nobody came up with the simple idea of forcing browsers to ask permission before sending personally identifying information everywhere.

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It's amazing what's personally identifiable though. Browser fingerprinting combined with ever present analytics scripts gets you most of the way there.

I need a plugin that spoofs my fingerprint as a 74-year-old shut-in with no money, terrible credit, and no social connections.

Basically someone companies have no interest in advertising to or tracking.

people would just begin to ignore those too, like they ignore app permission grants

That type reductive reasoning can be trivially applied to any proposed solution (for nearly any problem). You can't really force anything, eventually you just have to accept that some folks won't go along with it, and let them make their own mistakes.

How would that solve anything? The comment you are replying to doesn't want to be asked for permission for cookies. The commentor wants all the cookie requests to be accepted automatically.

He's suggesting making the decision once, per-browser, not per-website, whether or not to allow cookies. Then the browser can include this information in the HTTP header, so the website never needs to ask you.

Oh, Ok. I initially read it as the browsers should ask the user whenever they send personally identifying info, which is basically the status quo. Thanks for correcting me.

I mean, making the decision per-website is fine as well if that's what you prefer.

Most importantly though a browser can remember you declined cookies.

There are easy ways to do this though, I use uMatrix.

The joke is that this is a browser setting. Its just set to "Always accept without asking" by default.

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