Kill The Cookie Banner
killthecookiebanner.eu
killthecookiebanner.eu
But of course it’s impossible to convince someone of something when their livelihood depends on their not understanding it.
This is a jaw-drop moment for me every single time I observe someone else using the web and quickly clicking "accept" on every single cookie banners that pops up, without ever wasting a second even reading what they're accepting. It's mind boggling to me. Sure, I'm in IT, so surely I'm more aware of data mining, profiling, and other privacy-related aspects. But in many cases, you could just click "reject" and the banner would also disappear...
To me, having a browser setting for cookies is the only sane way to handle this, it's surprising that this was not considered from the beginning.
Some variant on "reject" takes more effort like 70% of the time. Which is on purpose, of course. The ones that aren't maliciously-complying have a "necessary only" button that insta-closes it, but tons pretend that you might want to allow some spying but not all of it and make you go through another screen if you don't just "accept all".
> To me, having a browser setting for cookies is the only sane way to handle this, it's surprising that this was not considered from the beginning.
Then it'd be possible to default it to "nope" (Firefox, and perhaps Safari, might do this) or to allow a "never, anywhere" setting the first time the question is asked, and malware and spyware vendors know that'd mean a much larger proportion of denials.
Clicking those "REJECT!" buttons might make you feel empowered, but it's pointless. Just set your browser to delete all the cookies at the end of the session except for whatever sites you want to allow to 'remember' you.
The whole thing has always been a problem to be properly solved by the browser, and it's probably just the fact that Google makes the only browser that matters, that it's been foisted upon every website owner, who mostly just wants basic analytics and to track conversions from the ads they run, and isn't "selling your data."
The browser is your user agent. If it's sending any information up to web servers on every request that isn't okay with you, why are you using it?
It is known that warnings and pop-ups that show up almost all the time yield diminishing returns. I think it was named "normalization of deviation" by some folks in a blog a while ago, and I believe that name fits. If you get warned about missing https all the time, or that something might be dangerous (even though it does precisely what you want it to do), it will loose its effect by the time you actually need it.
You can argue this is malicious compliance, but if you want it to go away it would probably be easier to go for banning tracking and personalized ads altogether. Eliminate the reason for this behavior, so to speak.
There is one. It's a DNT header. Knucklehead websites ignore it.
Oftentimes the reject flow is substantially more annoying than the accept flow. I click reject myself when it's an option, but I can absolutely understand how people might get conditioned to click accept when clicking reject might result in more popups.
There's a mismatch between the velocity at which people visit sites and the time it takes to navigate the cookie particulars of each site.
And, we can dismiss this as people being uninformed or lazy but the reality it is that's actually not so unreasonable. Cookies are in some ways near the bottom of the list where privacy is concerned, given everything else from breaches to search dossiers to device finger-printing to mobile device location-tracking to the ubiquity of cameras in the real world, and on and on.
The idea that we're clawing back privacy in any meaningful sense by blocking a few cookies here and there is kind of quaint.
What harm are you worried about?
They will fingerprint you with or without cookies. They may or not try to honor your preferences, but their "partners" will not try, and by the time you see that banner, it's all out there.
"Accept" is the close button.
This is exactly what browsers did back the 90s, they asked about every single cookie.
Then browsers got configurable options to simply accept either all cookies, no cookies, or only first party cookies (excluding third party sites unrelated to the domain you visited).
For now well over 20 years I have disabled 3rd party cookies in all browsers I use, and only in a few cases overall did I need to make exemptions.
So I'm not onboard with the "just block everything by default" crowd. If you frame the question as "Would you like ads to be more relevant to you" instead of "Do you want to allow tracking" you probably get a very different answer from users.
I would like the cookie banner to be changed to a browser setting, but I also would like the option to allow some sites to show relevant ads to me.
People do not have a right (morally speaking, not legally) to access or use a service (or a website) etc without having to read/agree to the terms (applies to analog and digital).
any sort of elevation prompt, IF I allow them to be popups or an icon in a toolbar, should always be in the same place and not cover the page.
The default is “no”. Without explicit consent you can’t do a lot of things.
You can’t have a default yes, because how can you agree with consent but automatically to everything?
And if it’s a no, are you saying you can’t ask a user for permission to use their data for a specific purpose?
And if you can ask, that’s what we have right now.
There’s no way this would fly. “I didn’t read it” can’t possibly be an excuse to avoid being bound by an agreement. Every party to an agreement that flaunted its terms, even though they took advantage of the benefits granted by it, would invoke it as a defense, and it’s irrefutable. The system would completely fall apart if this happened.
There’s a balance that needs to be carefully managed here. Yes, fairness to consumers is important. But you can’t destroy the incentive to produce value in so doing.
Only engineers have trouble understanding this. It can be a reasonable defense, and it has successfully been used in courts of law many times. The law is not a machine that compiles text like code literally. Imagine someone who coerces a dying or sick person to sign an agreement they couldn’t possibly be in a reasonable state of mind to understand what they were doing -- the law can and does invalidate such “contracts”. That is the same principle behind age of consent laws. The law could theorerically (and does) invalidate “agreements” which no one is reasonably expected to read and understand.
The value is derived from the people consuming the product. Placing the "incentive to produce value" above the people who presumably are the source of this value seems...misaligned.
Or that any actual human is aware that an agreement was made (since an AI can find a checkbox nowadays or software can be configured to bypass it). One way to add balance could be to require people asking for contracts to actually treat them like real serious legal documents, show up for the signing, and figure out who they are making an agreement with.
As it stands I just hit Accept on literally everything and that’s fine for me.
It already pushes the correct "Reject" button for you on a lot of sites (not all; it works based on rule lists)
So lawmakers do know how to make legally binding preferences based on device settings? What a crazy innovation.. now if only parents were given these options to indicate their child is using a device.. we could do away with all this Online Safety Act nonsense...
Browsers already had settings for deleting cookies. There was never a reason for banners whose only function was pulling the ladder up from smaller competitors and concentrating power in the hands of an oligopoly that could siphon data directly from the OS.
This coupled with a law mandating ISPs provide a "change IP on demand" feature would have given users a sort of "Tor light" level of privacy. Strong privacy is trivial to achieve for a government that doesn't have a conflicting goal of total surveillance.
Every time you get a cookie banner with options, the website wants to know more about you than the law permits by default.
It’s baffling we’re having this misunderstanding on this site in 2026 still.
The cookie banner isn't about the usage of cookies, it's about _the underlying tracking_. You're allowed to "just" use cookies for normal shit! You can make a website where you use cookies to store login state for a user, without a single banner.
The thing is that every company in the world feels the need to add 1000 tracking cookies to anonymous users to track them through conversion funnels (on top of the ad stuff). That's what you have to inform people about
You can use cookies normally without a banner! You can't track without consent! Every cookie banner is actually a "we want to track you" banner. Calling it a cookie banner is playing into the confusion about what those banners actually are meant to communicate
It's not hard to make privacy work when you are the government rather than working against a hostile one.
So instead everyone stays on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter, which ALSO operate on ads and have far more information on their users than any third-party ad tracker could ever have.
None of this has gotten rid of the privacy problems. It just consolidated them into the worst offenders while jeopardizing the plurality of the web. Now instead of people being tracked by Facebook on a website with a third-party cookie in a like button, they are tracked by Facebook on Facebook in a Facebook page because they never leave Facebook.
The online safety acts and its EU counterparts are somewhat risky, but nobody wants the mention the only proper alternative: a total ban on "social media." Not just for kids, but for everyone. Or a ban on smart phones, that would work too, at least short term. But: money.
This is unfortunately the reality.
The other day a friend asked me to help her make her phone safer for her kids to use. I started by asking if she set permissions on the apps she downloaded. She looked at me blankly, "What permissions?". I proceeded to show her how you can granularly control what you allow each app to do on your phone and what access it is allowed. Her head blew up, she had no idea any of this existed and after gong through a few menus, she didn't care any more. It was all too complicated and too much to think about for a busy mum.
This is why governments unfortunately are having to try to protect people from themselves. As tech competent people it all seems so simple to us, but we need to remember the majority of the population just click 'Allow All' and blow past all permission and security questions as they have no idea what any of it means.
It'd be even better if there was a way for people to selectively turn it off for specific devices without MITM the connections. It wouldn't be that hard to come up with a mechanism for that.
When restoring factory defaults, the same question, just in case the phone is sold, gifted, stolen or whatever.
If you are going to give a phone to a minor you should set that option right from the start.
Options between "we don't have tech in the house" and "wide-open tech, we have it all" are all some amount of painful, usually for no good reason.
(I remember once investigating how to do some pretty basic stuff for this in Linux, hoping to find something nicer than manually setting some executable permissions and firewall rules and then having to go back and change them all the time, and the closest thing to a guide I found was an old article from Red Hat that basically lead with "LOL, good luck you poor sap, Linux sucks at this" before going on to explain the various bad ways available to sort-of, but not entirely, accomplish it with a lot of work, and significant ongoing time-burden)
THIS
Holy shit. This is such an obvious fix. And it shuts up those surveillance state goons immediately.
My God, why have we tried to summon up the ghost of 1984 when such a simple fix as this will do.
Parents can lock devices into "child mode" that emits "user is child" headers. Websites can then block.
The blast radius is zero.
Good God, we need to fast track this into browsers right now. If we hurry we might be able to point to this as the technical fix.
Once some of the infrastructure exists, OS vendors can hook into it.
Firefox devs - please do this right now. Please spearhead this.
I might have to vibe code an advocacy site for the spec and set up a GitHub / RFC process.
CA tried this with AB 1856. I wasn't a fan of this (neither was EFF) because of the privacy and tracking concerns of blasting the fact that the user is a child to all websites.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/one-step-forward-two-s...
It would better for the block to happen at the device level. That is, the browser knows it's on a child's device and has a whitelist of allowed sites.
There is already an RTA (Restriced to Adults) header where the website self-labels that it's for adults only and the browser can block it while protecting the user's privacy. I'd prefer expanding the use of RTA.
The web is too big and changes too much and that's before we get to the issue of applying laws to a whitelist based on different juristictions worldwide.
And I have to question, who would administer it? The parents? They won't. Google or Apple? Why do they want to deal with irate parents or culture wars around what is or is not on the list?
There is obvious increasing demand for this from parents, politicians are going to act on it, I think a "this is a child" header is the only one that actually really works. It works for the parents because it's easy to setup. It works for websites because they can cleanly identify a child and filter content if appropriate.
It seems to me that every other solution than a "this is a child" header is either impractical or way worse.
I've long since considered that the efforts for online child safety should be pointed at educating parents and spearheading some kind of certification of compliance for child safety of software and websites.
[this product is certified to adhere to EU:CSA]
Then you can block everything not certified, and the software that does the blocking would also be certified, the two major prongs you need (endpoints and sites working together: else they're blocked). The rest of the money goes to education for parents about this fact, and the dangers of not doing it, and how to do it.
This is super "easy" (when comparing to the effort it would take for putting backdoors in everything).
Which is why I think that the reason is definitely not child safety, and more about crime control.
Me talking about UK blocking people unless they ID themselves in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979295
Me talking about how its disingenuous because we have superior technical solutions to this particular issue last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010902
No cookie banner is required for functionally necessary cookies.
EU official website in it’s cookie banner glory: https://european-union.europa.eu/index_fr
I get similarly upset, when I see Google tracking on official websites of government or public institutions.
No, they don't really need to track you, that's why it requires consent to do it.
They are doing exactly what they say.
In other words, they're not saying don't track your visitors. They're saying get consent first.
https://commission.europa.eu/resources/europa-web-guide/desi...
> Use of the cookie consent kit is mandatory on each page of the DGs and executive agencies-owned websites, regardless of the cookies used.
if they didn't use third party cookies they wouldn't need it
Any future law in regards to this will likely just lead to the companies that already got consent (companies you already have accounts with) becoming even deeper entrenched.
Non targeted ads pay a small percentage of targeted ads.
In the UK a few news sites have changed cookie banners to "you can accept and see this stuff for free, or you can sign up for a subscription, which would you prefer?". It's the only time I hit accept (and then clear browser history).
If blanket preferences from browser signals became the norm, a segment might open up where you would configure preferences and a data broker would make sure you get something in return for your data. At minimum it might force paywalled publishers to consider that as a "lite" subscription option.
There are so few sites where I really need cross-site logins to work that an opt-in would be much more preferable.
Have all sites set cookies on whichever third party they want, but don't share those cookies over. Add an explicit "Do you really want foo.com to share data with bar.com?" if you really need to see those facebook comments on your news site.
Need to look up a bus time? Full screen cookie consent with accept buttons drawn OFF THE SCREEN.
Your kind comes into every one of these threads and says some version of "well if they weren't tracking then they'd have nothing to worry about and no need to show a banner", but that is so obviously not true to anyone who uses the web. You absolutely do not need to defend a law that is not working.
It wasn't on EU Commission to "finally propose a solution". The soluton has always been there.
Somehow, Google, aka world's largest tracking and advertising company incidentally making the worlds' dominant browser and completely dominating all web standards, couldn't be bothered, and instead was pushing crap like FLoC
Google knows if you can set this once it's game over for their adverting business. At least with the cookie banners, there's a possibly you won't refuse every banner.
Especially those banners that only have "Accept" or "More options" with all those checkboxes to clear.
> When the law takes effect in January 2027, Californians will see new privacy options in web browsers. When enabled, these controls will automatically inform websites of their privacy preferences, helping to protect personal information from being sold to data brokers and other third parties. This means they will be able to protect their data — like their browsing history, location data, purchase history, and personal interests — across the entire internet with a single step.
Sounds good, as long as it covers the "legitimate interest" bollocks⁰ that is often hidden in inconvenient UI nests as well as the basic preference.
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[0] "we see your preference not to be stalked, but we want to anyway, click again for every partner to reconfirm you don't want them following you around"
And for a serious website, front end analytics are kind of a necessity to understand how users interact with pages and improve the experience. Note that it certainly doesn't require tracking the behaviour of individual users, just understanding how controls are used in aggregate.
I know it seems like you could work around this with careful design and maybe focus groups and such, but I can tell you we regularly uncover surprising insights from (aggregate) trends in front-end events.
See here[0], page 6:
> As stated in Article 5(3) ePD: ‘This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.’
0: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/documents/2024-10/ed...
As long as you do not share that info with 3rd party, and the user requested it, you can store via cookies pretty much whatever you want without the need for a consent screen
Good websites sharing stuff for the fun of it rarely ever add these obnoxious banners. They probably should if they embed other trackers (like Youtube or Google Fonts) but often just don't. It's only the ones that want to make money off you that bother putting in the obnoxious banners.
Even the use of the word "cookie" is framing by industry to confuse people.
3% of people want to be tracked online? I think it's more likely that 3% of people misunderstood the survey question
I don't really use youtube natively a lot anymore, but I used to with Google's "personalised ads" turned off. I don't know if you've tried that, but the ads Google serves you if you opt out of personalised adds are sketchy, creepy and mostly not child appropriate (a lot of medical stuff, plus adverts for mail order brides etc). Back then I opted in to personalised ads because being tracked seemed a better option to me than being served inappropriate material without my consent.
Anyway, that's a long rant, but my point is, there's edge-cases and weird contexts in which I can imagine people saying something like "of the options I see as likely to happen, I'd most like to be tracked".
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
Browser-based privacy controls were proposed in the late-90s/early-2000's as P3P, and were killed by corporate interests.
> ...
> You may think that EU privacy law requires cookie banners. But the law is clear: online tracking is prohibited by default.
That's an excellent idea... lets see how its implemented on https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en
Oh... there's a cookie banner.
I'm visiting a website, i don't want to make a legal agreement with every website ...
Social media bad for kids? Everyone hand over your ID at the door ...
Then you blame the government.
I don't have a lot of confidence for legislative solutions. Although I admire people who keep trying.
I guess that most companies just chuck it up there as a default so they dont have to read the law, or maybe they are all actually harvesting and selling personal data and therefore require cookies? Who knows.
If the banner's not required, it ends up saying stuff like "we'd like permission to share your data with 0 partners". Ever see that?
The fact is most website operators want to use your data for non-essential purposes.
50% that, and 50% that way more companies than you expect are harvesting and profiting from your data.
I think most companies just don't give a fuck about user privacy and therefor have to show one. There are of course exceptions. But I don't know how many of them have been actual (for-profit) companies.
On our go-live form there’s a question “do you use cookies” and it’s yes/no. If you say yes legal block the site from going live without the pre approved cookie banner…
I mean that both in the sense of "you, plural" (your company should fix that) and "you, personally" (because diffusion of responsibility is a real issue, and someone needs to actually do it).
Just checking, you do know that still counts as tracking and may fall under GDPR rules? GDPR was never just about cookies.
That has been my guess as well. If you run npm install half-the-internet you have no idea what's in there, so just slap on that cookie banner for good measure. Of course the real problem is not knowing what's inside your application, but the thought process is "eh, if a blanket cookie banner does the job then that's good enough for me".
There is ZERO cost to abusing the user over, and over, and over again by asking for permission to track them.
We shouldn't have the cookie banners at all because NO company should be able to do anything with tracking data. Just ban the use of user data by companies and most of SillyCon Valley's garbage behaviors are fixed.
Similarly, I should never get "terms of service updates" from digital companies because there should be no changes that they can make. You can provide the obvious service that you're providing; you can't aggregate my data for any purpose other than directly serving me; you can't aggregate my data with that of other users; if you retain my data for any other purpose, the government should take percentages of your revenue. I shouldn't have to wade through the BS that the mercenary corporate lawyers cook up to extract value from me.
I have personally never ever had any problems with the cookie banner since Brave deletes them with 100% accuracy, there's sometimes where a site will refuse to function properly, but it's usually sites I don't care about anyway and if I HAVE to get it working I disable brave shield, turn off all tracking, consent and turn the shields back on.
It is unfortunate that most browsers cannot implement this as it goes against what the companies behind the browsers want. Deleting the cookie prompt would stop people from occasionally just accepting all cookies and opting into tracking after getting tired of it.
Perhaps the EU Commission could start by stopping the circus on its own website and killing its own cookie banner: https://commission.europa.eu/index_en
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
As written, this doesn't eliminate cookie banners completely, only if your browser is sending a Do Not Track header or similar. That's unfortunate news if you use fingerprint protection - those send default headers, so you'll still be bombarded with cookie banners. Hopefully existing anti-fingerprinting solutions will offer a "default headers but with Do Not Track" option.
Sites that easily allow you to simply reject everything are then a short hop, skip and a jump into browser settings where you auto-reject all cookie/tracking nonsense
Another good one to have the "hide Youtube shorts" filter, featured on HN a while back.
Also I wanna know when websites don't give a shit about my privacy and therefor have to show a cookie banner. While theoretically not consenting should mean not collecting blocking it altogether and modifying page content might mean "all bets are off". If the website expects you to have made a decision that might wrongly consider it consent.
Consent-O-Matic says "I don't consent".
So now they'd have a new popup that says "reconfigure your browser to accept tracking, or pay us, or you can't access the page". Which isn't really an improvement.
I don't want randomnewssite to track me. But a favorite online store...I do want help with recommendations.
It's easier to click a single button than hunt for how to create/access an account for the brand.
Ironically, this has the effect of cookie banners reappearing every time because they cannot place a cookie that says that you have rejected them.
Unfortunately this means you have to view a lot of the web through archive.today or web.archive.org - I would know because I have uMatrix configured this way.
-> not really sensible
;dr
The "cookie banner" is an interactive method used by "adtech" companies to try to get user consent, as required by EU law. The forced interaction makes this method annoying
Google and other "adtech" companies are lobbying EU Member States to vote against giving users a means to non-interactively deny consent
I would say, we are like 80% there. Yes, there are still some dark patterns employed by cookie banners, trying to trick you into accepting tracking. But they are not too hard to make out. And they can be fixed by tuning the regulation a bit: Require the opt-out to be the first choice and the only one with highlighting.
Ad tracking is not going away tomorrow. If we ever are going to get rid of it, we first need legislation to defang it so it stops being a cash-cow. "Tracking prohibited by default" is a great end-goal, but we are not there yet.
Reading between the lines, it appears that there is some new solution proposed to "automatically communicate your privacy preference". That's nice, but when e.g. the Do Not Track header was tried, it just fell flat. So until this new solution is implemented and adopted, I'll take my websites with a cookie banner, thank you.
It is an unfortunate choice that the campaign obsesses over the cookie banner, instead of trying to actually advance the solution that would make it obsolete.
The fact that we are still talking about this literally a decade after the GDPR was adopted shows that this isn't working. It has turned into a cat-and-mouse game, and the regulators just don't have the manpower to effectively rules-lawyer every tiny change.
> when e.g. the Do Not Track header was tried, it just fell flat.
... because there was no reason to follow it. There was literally zero consequence for ignoring it.
This new proposal makes the Do-Not-Track v2 header legally binding. User sends the header and you still show a consent popup? You're breaking the law, simple as that. No weaseling yourself out of it, a simple screenshot is enough.
Any regulator could build a fully-automated scanner in half a day: ask the local TLD registrar for a mapping of websites to companies, have some script request the page and do a regex search for "cookie" (or use AI if you are feeling fancy), take a screenshot, pass it to an intern to double-check, then automatically send out a €100 fine. Double it every X weeks they haven't fixed it yet. Want to fight it in court? They have screenshot, you lose, now pay.
The answer is simple. Don't use tracking cookies.
Put a note in your calendar, write a letter and send it then.
btw, the link say it's around 3% of people who want to be tracked when the reports state it's between 3 and 10%. it's misleading.
He asked me "So, how would you make the Internet better at Google?".
My response, "Setup preferences in Chrome to eliminate all popups including Cookie banners".
I never got a call back for the second interview.
Oh.
https://stateofutopia.com/laws/2/law2.html
This is not a proposal, it is duly ratified international law that applies to "Every Browser Maker making a Browser available anywhere" and "Any site anywhere that receives a valid signal".
The EU Commission had until July 18, 2026 to modify its laws:
>"The site shall not display a banner, modal, interstitial, or other prompt requesting a choice already expressed by the signal. It may optionally provide a “Cookie Settings” or “Privacy Settings” link. This Law overrides all laws requiring such a display. Where any country or supernational entity has a conflicting law, it must rectify the Law within 30 days not to require such notification."
Therefore, insofar as it has not rectified its laws not to require such a notification, the EU Commission is in violation of international law as of 8 days ago.
Under section 7.3, "The State of Utopia may order compliance, require corrective updates, suspend non-compliant distribution, and impose civil penalties. Fines may be levied in any amount for continued non-compliance." so we can fine the EU Commission whatever you guys want ($1 billion? $10 billion? whatever four and a half millennia are worth) and just distribute the collected fines among you all as cash payments.
[1] Here is the announcement of the law 38 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48585778
I guess what I'm saying is, there is no good solution here. I don't want every site I visit to require a usage fee just to browse. Imagine if slashdot turned into WSJ with a paywall for every article.
Kagi already does something like this, and cool - if you use it enough, maybe its worth a subscription. I dont find myself googling (searching) much anymore, so paying to do so just becomes something i need to find a way around. Like API token usage for AI, using it is like making a new recipe in the oven every time. You expect it to work but you have to invest the time and money into the attempt before you can find out the results (whereas you dont have to do this on free chatgpt, google search with ai, etc as comparison). Too much investment without guarantee of results. I'm fine without that guarantee as long as im not wasting my time and money upfront.
Anyways, thanks for letting me rant
Sure, but magazines get a massive portion of their revenue through advertising without trackers. Same with television, or radio, or billboards.
And the ad space isn't exactly very healthy either. Take a large Youtube channel like Linus Tech Tips, for example: AdSense only accounts for 10% of their revenue! Youtube has been drowning people in ads and it still barely pays any money.
I think we should seriously consider the possibility that targeted ads might be less profitable overall. Ad blockers didn't become a thing solely because ads appeared on the web. Ad blockers became popular when ads became obnoxious and privacy-invading. With the current state of the web ad blockers are a hard requirement for a reasonable browsing experience, so the only people seeing ads are the handful of suckers too ignorant to install them.
But if ads aren't as invasive and obnoxious, people would have far fewer reasons to install ad blockers. See for example the Acceptable Ads program of Adblock Plus. If switching to user-respecting ads resulted in a significant portion of people turning off their ad blockers, it could very well result in an increase in ad revenue!
I am kind of wanting to f around and found out. I missed the old internet were most of the big websites are run by hobbyist. I know some of them may not be able to pay the bill without ad. May we can figure out something once we leveled the playing field
also some say it should be browser setting. Thye gonna piss on it, same as google piss on autoplay API setting on youtube (still autoplaying) 'bc their business model would hurt...'
However, powerful interest groups like ad companies that profit from your attention (which hysterically virtually powers the Internet today) were able to stop it from happening.
It was debated way back in 2009 when the GDPR was being developed. Iirc the argument was that browsers accept cookies by default so users do not get a fair consent moment. This is obviously easily fixed by regulation requiring browsers to ask users once.
Seems extremely backwards that we chose to forever darken the entire Web browsing experience just so users can "benefit" from a per-site option to let Google profit from them, with virtually zero payoff for the end user (ad relevance?).
P.S. If ad revenue is an essential pillar of Internet survival and fruition, the clear alternative seems to be sharing a fraction of that revenue with the tracked consumer.
This industry is a paperclip maximizer, and it needs to be dealt with accordingly.
but the proper functionality would be no cookies that require consent until consent is given
Is there any reason for allowing this tracking browser side besides a little convenience for the web devs?
But we can't have that, can we ? They will lobby to hell and back for that to not happen
Overall this is a common sense solution. The challenge is that a significant industry makes money by collecting and selling data. It makes it harder for businesses who depend on it, they are going to get creative and will eventually come up with some dark pattern to circumvent it.
It's just like ADA compliance and trolling lawyers all over again.
It's YOUR browser, a locally running software on a physical computer YOU own which memorize the cookie key-value pair a remote host told YOU to memorize and YOU return the same value later. It's YOU who allowed the cookie. If YOU don't want to allow the cookie, YOU simply not allow it.
You are technically 100% control on cookie. These JavaScript implemented in-page UI has no guarantee to respect your wish. But you have a power to disable it.
E.g. storing your precise geolocation for 12 years: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
GDPR is not about cookies; it is about tracking. Whether the tracking is done through cookies or through other means makes absolutely no difference.
You can prevent some tracking via your browser, but definitely not all of it.
In 2024 Mozilla acquired Anonym from former Meta executives and decided to introduce PPA: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=privacy+preserving+attribution
It's great. The current law forces people that don't give a shit about user privacy to have a banner (or any other way of asking for consent first) while giving everyone that cares and everyone not wanting to spy on their visitor a free pass.
1: https://www.cnil.fr/fr/cookie-walls-la-cnil-publie-des-premi... (in french, sorry)
Does anybody here know of a better solution?
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/istilldontcar...
Consent-O-Matic -> automated configuration to your preferences using the dialog provided.
I still don't care about cookies -> least privacy friendliest option, because it may opt into undesired tracking (its goal is just to remove the annoyance of the dialogs)
People not reading back on history is still very much a thing.
> The solution: automatically communicate your privacy preference
Would be lovely and would happen if it weren't for… wait for it… Google and whole effed up ad-busines:
https://ppc.land/eu-council-drops-cookie-signal-after-google...
F*ck google and other BigTech…
Why the fuck do people have to keep stating the same preference over and over again. This is a hellscape of bad government AND corporate policy colliding.
- for the love of god please do this
- please get rid of every cookie banner on every website on this planet once and for all
- you ll be doing humanity a huge favor
instead of building websites and writing laws over the span of decades that just seem to want to ban targeted advertising but don't actually do it. FFS.
1. Making tracking impossible/illegal would NOT kill cookie banners, since you need them to record consent for other purposes as well, such as embedding a video from a third party like YouTube.
2. The GDPR explicitly prohibits site-owners from making cookie banners misleading. The law is already there, it is just not very well enforced.
3. "This results in up to 90% of people saying “YES” – even though only around 3% actually want to be tracked online" This claim is grabbed out of thin air and can be dismissed as such.
4. "The solution: automatically communicate your privacy preference" This is nonsense because it does not actually solve anything, because you need to record consent for a variety of purposes, not just analytics/tracking.
5. Killing tracking would kill the value of ads (since they are not targeted anymore), resulting in a reduced ability for small businesses to advertise and a hugely increased amount of ad spam everywhere. Few targeted ads > Many untargeted ads
Unless you want an internet where advertising is no longer possible, this solves nothing apart from stroking a few activists ego.
I've wanted the option to select your cookie preferences once and forget in a brower for ever.
I assume the reason this wasn't done initially was corporate pressure (most people would opt-out of everything by default).
1.2 billion exposed users × 8.17 years×365×3 banners/day×4 seconds÷36 is roughly 10-15 billion human hours lost to dealing with damn cookies since GDPR took effect on May 2018.
That's about 17,000 human lives.
At all.
EDIT: It's obvious that people really hate this option. Maybe too many here have their incomes too closely tied to the metrics that cookies are designed to collect. It could also be that it is an unrealistic option for everything except the most extreme societal changes.
If you are old enough and look back far enough you may remember the time before all this bullshit like I do. Once marketing and advertising get involved and gain power in an organization, things tend to go to shit fast.
> Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner.
Fortunately, if you have uBlock Origin, you can enable Easylist cookie notices under annoyances and avoid most of them. Combine with blocking third-party cookies, and the problem pretty much disappears.
The fact that the EU tried to regulate this stuff is a shame, because regulation is not a good remedy. End-users have agency here. The solution is to enable end-users to have control in their browser (which they always did, so it's an issue of education, like so many things).
Shame that Google is trying to kill uBO though. Extremely pleased that Brave continues to support it.
The Do Not Track header is the only technology needed. The rest is compelling companies to obey it.
Just step back and ask yourself what each side of that debate is trying to achieve and why. What is motivating them? Why are they motivated in that way?
Don't just recite what you "know", think, look, research, figure it out. It might sound good to have a one-liner like this in your back pocket, but do you really believe it after looking at the publicly available information that it is their real intention to conduct a "crusade to destroy the internet"?
(because it drives consumerism)
Cookies were never a problem. Just get rid of the banner.
This other legislation should pass/fail on its own merit.