Hacker News Reader

Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

And there was an initiative to include tracking preferences in browser HTTP headers, which never made it, as it was quite obvious that this would lead to a lot of people opting out.

Better to just harass them into a habit of dismissing the banner.

View on HN

Well DNT indeed did not made it, but there is global privacy control header that is nowadays required as explicit opt-out mechanism by CCPA and some other states legislation. I always implement support for GPC in my products.

Never seen this offered to be set by any browsers, though.

Firefox offers it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control

They don't seem to call it GPC, but their "ask websites not to track" feature now uses it instead of GPC.

Yes ok, and Firefox was also the only browser that offered DNT, which is why it pretty much died.

It died because companies had no incentive to respect it. The writers of the GDPR could have easily added a single line saying you had to respect the DNT header, but they chose not to.

It's the complete opposite. What killed DNT is Microsoft adding it to their browser and set it to true by default, pretending they cared about their users. Doing so, it was not the expression of the users anymore and so web developers ignored it, and so it died.

Sorry, that does seem like a reasonable default. This is the fault of web developers to not respect it, not Microsoft. Nice cope.

I think you’re missing the point that this caused a backlash from the ad industry / publishers that suddenly stopped recognizing these headers, otherwise it would impact their bottom line too much. Obviously it’s a good default from a user’s perspective.

I wonder how many websites use that header as part of their fingerprint mechanism.

It's set on by default in "privacy browsers" like Brave or Zen, but off by default in most mainstream ones -- user needs to set it on explicitly via about:config

There is also https://killthecookiebanner.eu/

if you write to your reps, they might just change that. The Eu is one of the few democracies left. Slow but powered by the people

I dunno man, from an outsider's perspective I used to think that but it seems to slowly be getting worse with trying to shove through internet surveillance and corporate protectionism under the guise of "protect the kids". I guess sadly someone saw how unreasonably effective that can be in the US.

Well the Chatcontrol thing was a really close call. and they only got through with it because they did a third vote on the law when everyone was relaxed about it being rejected twice.

But yeah, scaring the people back in line is always a tactic thats used

Reply on news.ycombinator.com