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Comment by bitdotdash | Hacker News Reader

Would be nice if there was some uniformity to these and you could set granularized default preferences at your browser just the once, and have them applied universally in all cases where site options match the norm, and just requires interaction for the few instances were there are some granular permissions that need to be set outside of the default set. Bonus points for adding those new rules to your default set for future use.

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What would have been really nice, would have been for for those 'cookie consent' forms to be managed at the browser level. It's not like browsers don't already have infrastructure in place to manage cookies. All they need is to make it more accessible.

I wonder how often granular permissions are chosen in the first place. i.e. when someone doesn't give the automatic full yes-to-all consent, how likely are they to leave _some_ boxes unticked?

For me at least there are some things I'm fine with. Google Analytics doesn't bother me. Random ad networks and selling my data to 3rd parties does. (Yes I realize google uses analytics data for Google Ads, but I don't have as many issues with google ads as I do with J-Random Ad Network ran by some-unknown-shady-org)

And are you fine enough with them to actively go looking through all the items to see what they are? Personally I know that there are sometimes things I might be ok with, but that'd require me to read every checkbox's label - so I just uncheck them all.

All that's really missing to make that possible is a way for websites to mark a cookie as either "essential" or "other". Then you can move the UI for accepting/denying cookies to the browser without forcing the user to throw the baby out with the water. You can also add more cookie categories to enable more informed choices (I might be OK with tracking for UX purposes, but not with tracking for marketing).

The consent dialogs aren't really about cookies, though. They are about tracking personal information. Many cookies aren't used for tracking and you can track without using cookies.

Cookies that aren't used for tracking don't require consent though (except for weird corner cases). That only leaves us with "tracking without cookies" which is technically already solved by the "do not track" header (though of course in practice it isn't really solved, mostly because of how browsers implemented it)

Frankly at this point all I want is a way to signal "Yes I have looked at the cookie settings in my browser and I know what I'm doing".

There is at least one way that I know of to realize your dream. First, disable "do-not-track" header in your browser. Secondly, lobby for organizations to honor the "do-not-track" header. The whole world will thank you.

How does disabling the do-not-track header help me? I can't indicate that I take responsibility for handling the cookies by not sending a header, that would be passive 'consent' which doesn't qualify.

Also it's not that I'm consenting to being tracked I just don't care whether they set cookies as I will delete them automatically anyway. That's very different from telling them to go ahead and figure out my identity.

Use on of the anti cookie consent banner blocklists with your ad blocker?

I mean I do, but some of them still get through.

There is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

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