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Comment by joekrill | Hacker News Reader

This is a very naive response. Rarely is anything "trivially implemented". And if it's so trivially implemented, why haven't we seen a browser vendor implement something already? Websites have been circumventing attempts to prevent fingerprinting for a long, long time. To act like this is some simple task is hugely misleading.

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I think you may have misunderstood my comment. I meant that the "consent forms" should be a browser-side feature, consistent across websites and such that things like cookie blocking are guaranteed to be honoured. This is trivial.

Things like server-side fingerprinting must be enforced through legislation, e.g. it's against the law to track users if they've selected not to in the consent form.

Old man programmer here. I also think it is trivially implemented. What is hard is having the world agree to and craft such a standard.

Young person programmer here. There are a couple of privacy-oriented browsers. If it were really trivial, it’d have been implemented already. Just look at the cat and mouse game between Apple and advertisers around Safari, and the new fingerprinting techniques that show up every now and then. Not much is trivial in web browsers.

There is zero need for standards, which won’t happen anyway because of the power Google has with Chrome.

I think you didn't understand the proposition. Browser authors cannot unilaterally implement a proposal that has server-side and legislative components.

We cannot rely on server-side protections, because the people who control the servers are often acting against us. Standards won't change that; the linked article is about how website go against a law. We know what change a standard and gentleman's agreement can bring. We've seen it with Do not Track.

The only protections we can have right now are client-side.

1) Implement the Do-Not-Track header on the client side

2) Pass a law making it illegal for a company with business in the EU to not honor a Do-Not-Track header, with a transition period of several years.

Step 1 is technically very easy. Step 2 is legislative.

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