What if browsers made it so when you turned off cookies, instead of not allowing anything to be written, they instead gave each page you visited its own fresh cookie jar that was cleared when you navigated away?
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
edit: remove redundant "together"
When you tell Multi-Account Containers to always open a domain in a specific container, Temporary Containers knows about this, but for some reason it prompts you for additional confirmation. And sometimes this prompt breaks sites the first time through, adding an additional iteration when trying to configure a container to work with a site that uses multiple domains. Other than that they work together fine.
I would also recommend the Cookie Quick Manager extension, which lets you manage cookies on a per-container basis. If you have been using Multi-Account Containers by it self, then any links you open from a page will open in the same container (say reading news sites from HN), and you likely have a bunch of cross-site cookies stored there. This extension will let you clear out any undesired third-party cookies that have gathered in the container. The UI is a bit unclear at first (which of these three trashcan icons scattered across the page delete the subset of cookies I want), so read the tooltips before clicking an icon.
It probably can't be every site being separate since that breaks a number of things sites do (like opening 3p windows to complete transactions), but it could probably be done in some kind of logical group manner. Maybe by using different window colors to signify the partitions.
The solution to "software authors routinely collecting more info than they should" is not "accept the behavior as irredeemable, and just normalize it".
The answer is "make ot way more visible to users when it is done, snd make it harder for software authors to do/maintain." Anything else is just a tacit acknowledgement and grant of legitimacy to the behavior in question.
* use as in use for the intended business purposes, not harder to write the code
What you propose, simply yelling at developers to stop requesting unneeded permissions, would have no useful effect. They won't change. And most customers won't care and will blindly click accept no matter what if they think they have to to access their game.
Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Assume that other actors in the world will respond the way they usually do, not the way you think they should. That is the way to get things done.
(For those who are unaware, a lot of free apps pay for themselves by secretly recording location history and then selling it. This is why companies and even government agencies can buy mass location data when they want and query it to find out who was where when. This has been going on for years and is well known and documented and in no way secret. Just for anyone who missed it somehow.)
Besides which, I don't care if you feed me garbo GPS GLONASS if I've war driven and reverse indexed local wireless nodes to GIS coords. There's more than one way to get at coordinates, and enough hands in the jar in terms of being honest with location data by default that it'd be an uphill battle to fight teach users just how many ways a mobile handset can potentially leak location data.
The problem is that the data is retained at all. Until that data is considered toxic/a liability, there will be no respite from it.
If you set it as default browser then all links you click will be openend there. Hit the back button when you're done and everything is deleted.
Another use case is if you quickly want to open some website to look something up: open the website, maybe click a few links, and when you're done everything is wiped.
You can keep a regular Firefox (or Chrome or whatever) for surfing to those websites where you want to keep some state.
Such a weird choice to put the onus on the websites to ask whether to give the cookies, rather than the browser to ask whether to save them. I'm a big supporter of privacy legislation like the GDPR, but this is asinine, as it needs me to trust every website I visit to actually honor my choice.
Really, the original sin of cookies is that were designed to be transparent to user. That was a mistake that promptly needs to be rectified.
I do use Multi-Account Containers and Temporary Containers too, but typically when I want multiple simultaneous sessions, rather than wanting my current session to be cleaned up.
For privacy purposes, Incognito mode achieves the same effect without any of the hassle. Maybe turning off cookies should not even be an option anymore?