Hacker News Reader

Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why cookie popups are a website feature rather than a browser feature. Wouldn't it make far more sense to just have the browser default to disabling cookies, and show a popup if the web page wants to use them? Then it would be simple to say "accept all cookies", or "always deny cookies" rather than having a new popup on each site.

View on HN

Worth noting that Google would probably do its very best to keep anything like this from coming to fruition with its tight grip on Chrome and web standards. And it’s not in the interest of individual companies to go through with this sense the odds that you just click “deny all cookies now and evermore” are pretty high.

Just a case of perverse incentives and conflicts of interest.

It's also not in the interest of websites to show the cookie popups either, but they do it because they are legally required to do so.

I mean I think regulating it in either place is a bit silly, but if we are going to force users to accept cookies on each site, putting it in the browser is far easier to enforce (since you don't have to go after each site that doesn't do it), and a much better user experience.

This is a browser feature already. Every site chooses to ignore it due to lack of legal backing.

If the browser was to just disable the cookies API until the user allowed the site to store data in cookies, it wouldn't be something that the site would be able to ignore.

Because the relevant legislation was crafted by those who fundamentally do not understand how the web (or computers) work. The relevant parts of the GDPR should always have described a protocol where the browser acts as an agent on behalf of the user to declare privacy intent.

The GDPR is already technology neutral. You're thinking of the cookie law, which is different (but often confused with the GDPR). Or perhaps you've been hoodwinked by people who are using annoying consent pop-ups to pretend to adhere to the GDPR (they don't).

The browser could also have a setting for eu (gdpr) mode that would enable the cookie notifications. As there is no way for a website to automatically determine if a user is a eu citizen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com