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people aren’t agreeing to write a blank check and give up reasonable expectations of privacy by clicking a link. They can’t even know what the cost of visiting a page will be until they’ve already visited it and paid the price.

This is the crucial point to me. How can I agree to a website's trackers before I know they exist?

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This is also what the much-maligned EU cookiewall was intended to address: you inform visitors about your tracking /before/ you start tracking them.

Though I don't know at which stage that incentive was bungled (other than: "doomed from the start, because people").

Correct me if I'm wrong (because I don't live in the EU and can't verify this), but to comply with the cookie law websites started just displaying "we use cookies" in the header somewhere and didn't actually change anything. Meaning its the same as browsing the internet everywhere else you just get told that this is happening.

No correction, that is what happened. But I don't know if that's because the law was naively constructed, naively interpreted or willfully misinterpreted because it's easier to implement.

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