User agent sovereignty would be nice... except the most used browser and 1/2 of smartphones are controlled by Google, the largest ad tracking company on the planet.
We're way past the 90s.
Brave has shown that we can have an user agent that is aligned with the user, even if the browser engine is made by Google.
I'd say it's probably not a good day for Brave advocacy. Neither is any other day.
For the record: go back to the article that you are (wrongly) alluding to [0] and see how much the author has retracted. Also, see the response from Brave's Chief of Search.
I "have" to keep advocating them because all the opposition that is presented is always based on false information, biased and prejudiced and clearly made by people who never used the browser or tried to understand the value proposition.
There are tons of things to criticize about Brave (their "partnerships" with Binance and Solana, their complete lack of interest in making BAT an actual currency for payments online, them completely losing the train of decentralized social media) but none of that ever comes up from the detractors, only this kind of bullshit like the one you bring up.
[0]: https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai...
The Brave Search API does not respect the site's licensing, and Brave is under the assumption that 1) because they are a search engine and 2) because they attribute the URI of data - this puts them in the clear to scrape and resell data word-for-word.
Brave steals data and resells it, and is not to be considered a trustworthy entity.
But I do agree with you that "free market tech" created the problem of "tracking cookies are ubiquitous and users don't know how to control them". But then regulators just layered another annoyance on top of that, instead of solving that actual problem.
Also never forget we already had a perfectly good solution in the form of Do Not Track headers that a benevolent governing body would have simply mandated abiding by. Instead we have this shithole.
The only way it ever would have been respected if it was required to cryptographically sign an acceptance of cookies, then the server was required to retain that attestation as proof of acceptance, subject to legal liability if they were found in possession of tracking data without a valid attestation.
Absent enforceability, even when the server actively and maliciously decided to ignore it, it was a toothless solution.
The rub here is that everyone wanted to ignore DNT, because it made them lots and lots of money.
I think those pop ups are the worst thing that ever happened to the web because they eliminated the moral authority that anyone had to say “it is user hostile to use pop ups”. Once the EU made it appear “required” and even “laudable” or “prosocial” there was no basis to say “you shouldn’t put this other popup in that will make users feel harassed”.
So now we get pages where the popups get in the way of the other popups.
I suppose the formalism around popups, and specifically when the EU decided to start levying fines on entities who used dark patterns to avoid the spirit of "accept/reject must be equally easy to click", convinced me that user-visible was a better way to win the fight.
Granted, it's not a technically optimal solution, but it may be a politically optimal one. Vis-a-vis the people vs the advertising industry.
I'm unconvinced that DNT would have ever garnered the same support as something that people, and specifically politicians, can see. Which would have led to ad money quietly carrying the day.
I'm hopefully after we've chiseled "Thou shalt respect user decisions" in stone deeply enough, we can flip back to enabling a user agent to automatically respond to that question for us.
I heard recently that's actually wrong. We are born helpless, and learning to take control. The helplessness is innate, and we learn to overcome it.
In democracy, the innate helplessness of citizens is overcome by learning to participate in governance - activism, elections, public functions and so on.
The people who say "government does nothing good ever" are the ones who want to keep people in their natural helpless state. It's like telling a student, "you're doing it all wrong and can never be good".
For reference, in my experience, the public works projects that get front page news coverage with tons of anecdotes from locals about how incredibly helpful and long-needed the installation was, are those that were completely unsanctioned.
And the only path to substantial policy change in all of history has always been violent revolution.
But especially in democracy, you have a lot of opportunities to use official ways to institute change, like being elected or vote.
I also think there is plenty of positive social change that happens non-violently.
Learned helplessness can by definition manifest only after you have tried something and failed. Hence you cannot have learned helplessness after being born, because you had no opportunity to try anything yet.
You're knowledge is sound, but rather than condescedingly relegate people to your 'simple' workaround - the ENTIRE premise of cookies and tracking against ones implicit desire to be private, is assinine.