The EU then passed a bill that said you can't collect data unless it's for one of six reasons, one of which is "user consent". This basically mandated opt-in, so everyone went super-aggressive on consent banners (which, BTW, are probably illegal).
It's ridiculous that Microsoft's response wasn't to just nuke trackers from space with some kind of adware blocker integration in Edge. This is the equivalent of a mugger saying he'll only honour your "do no mug" sign if the sign defaults to "mug me please" and has to be explicitly changed.
1. telemetry, for diagnostics and health monitoring
2. usage analysis, for program improvement and personalization
3. content analysis, for advertising and marketing purposes
Windows requires kind 1 and encourages kind 2*. Type 3 does not really apply, though, as I don't see Windows sniffing what I write in my text files so that I'm shown relevant ads later.
It's all explained here: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/data-collection-windows
* Also note that the Customer Experience Improvement Program has been with us since Windows 7. Same thing, just not perceived as badly as Windows 10.
(There's even 0), data collected for functional purposes like 2FA. Multiple companies have taken data straight from 0 to 3 once they see the possible revenue.)
Note how most ad blocking tech is either community-run FOSS projects or companies with not-so-savory business practices. It's really not the kind of work that browser vendors want to do. In fact, Apple went out of their way to create an extension type purely for delivering ad block lists to Safari all the way back in iOS 9. Ad blocking is that much of a pain that even Apple was willing to farm it out to third parties years before we got proper mobile extension support.
Occasionally, browser vendors get lucky, and there's a tracker type that's "easy enough" to kill. Things like third-party cookies would be one of them - but even then this required a huge amount of testing to avoid breaking apps that relied on them for authentication.
The only reason why ad block even works is because ad companies are incredibly paranoid and don't trust each other. The standard way to do display ads is to embed each other's `<iframe>`s or JS, which gives ad blockers a nice easy target to hit. Platforms like Facebook or Twitter that are trusted to do their own ad delivery and thus don't hotlink subresources are far harder to block. They can change how ads are styled basically every hour if they wanted, which would make any kind of rule-based ad blocking ineffective. If every ad platform did this, ad block as we know it would be dead.
> Consent of the data subject means any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her.
Which is why I suspect almost all "cookie banners" are worthless. They don't give a clear, informed consent, so the site operator is still not allowed to use the data for anything at all.