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Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

I want a cookie policy API in browsers. User has a master switch for: Ask Every Time, Yes, No, and Essential Only – then in the list of remembered sites you can toggle after the fact if your little heart so desires.

That's it, that's all I want. Give me back my web please.

Between cookies and user authentication I think the web is an actively user hostile place. We could and should have done better.

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We used to have a Do-Not-Track header, which all websites promptly ignored.

The hard part is having a legally-binding standard

Given the current available API, I'd imagine the law-maker could have decided to write in the law 'consent must be collected through a javascript window.confirm() popup'

It actually kind of exists: in Chrome and Firefox, you can block all third-party cookies, which are mostly ads and tracking, and keep those from the site itself, which are likely more useful. This doesn't remove the stupid banners though.

Yeah sorry but this just isn't true at all. When the browsers started blocking or otherwise crippling third party cookies by default a few years back, lots of companies changed how tracking works to get around it.

I know because I did it for a company I was working for.

Instead of being able to use a simple tracking pixel hosted on a third-party server we changed to having websites embed JavaScript hosted by us so we could set a first party cookie.

I don't think any respectable tracking uses third-party cookies these days because they just don't work well at all anymore.

Is there a halfway decent cookie manager for Safari (macOS, maybe iOS)?

This used to be a feature of most web browsers. Then they removed it.

This.

I am sure there are significant legal, technical and logistical challenges to overcome to do this, but are they insurmountable?

lynx has this, it's one of my favorite features.

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