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Comment by uwuemu | Hacker News Reader

I have one question: Why THE HELL isn't this a part of all browsers already? Why does it have to be some obscure 3rd party extension? And I don't mean just Chrome, I mean all of them. All browsers should have this option: "I don't care about gdpr cookies". Set a window object window.dontcare and done. Sites can check this and automatically comfirm or don't even show gdpr banners if window.dontcare is set. This cookie bullcrap has been a forced on all of us from the bureaucrat bastards in the EU, and now everyone has to click on what are essentially popup banners of the 2000s every time they visit a new site (or even the same site a bit later!). Fuck that. No, let me say it again: FUCK THAT.

Implementing this into a browser would be the biggest QOL improvement any web browser could possibly do at this point.

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Waah the big bad EU forced companies to disclose how they are using my data!

What I would like to see browsers do is grow a feature that tells web servers what uses of my data I consider acceptable, so that I don't have to waste my time every time I visit nearly every site on the entire damn Internet.

But we've been there before - P3P, Do-Not-Track, and now Global Privacy Control. Until regulators force web sites to obey signals from browsers, we're going to be stuck with these bloody popups.

Big bad from the EU from forbidding your solution. Website have to receive informed and specific consent.

This means that before getting your consent, each website has to show you the text. And they cannot get your consent from a setting that does not correspond to them, specifically.

So if you tell your browser: « I accept that website track me on what I do on them, but do not allow marketing related stuff », website are not allowed to recognise that level of consent, skip the banner and act accordingly.

What about an informed "absolutely not"?

In that case websites will absolutely show you a banner and/or intentionally make their services more difficult to use.

Any website showing a cookie banner already prioritizes their ad revenue over your convenience of not seeing a banner. So why would they implement any extra work to spare you that banner, if you're one of those customers that won't drive ad revenue?

I know, I know. If you introduce a blanket "no", websites will ignore it. They're not tracking us because it's what we want.

How can you tell "absolutely not" without going through the 37 pages of their policy, to make sure you understand exactly what you say "no" to ? Maybe there is something different about this specific website that might make you say "I usually say no, but this time, I'll say yes".

So, please read those pages - on every website - then systematically click on "Reject all". That's what the law asks you to do, and it is indeed absolutely nuts.

Why wouldn't "no, no exceptions" be an invalid answer? "Yes" requires an informed consent, but "no" does not. It's the default.

> Website have to receive informed and specific consent.

Websites only have to ask consent to track you if they track you in the first place. Sucks to suck.

Any website that's asking for your permission upfront is not getting informed and specific consent; it's getting general consent.

A decently-designed website would just tell you it's about to set a cookie with a “more info” link. If you choose to go ahead, that's informed specific consent.

Besides, under the GDPR companies can collect and store personal data without needing consent if it's for one of the listed permitted purposes. They only need consent at all if they have no good reason to collect the data — consent is really supposed to be the excuse of last resort.

> Waah the big bad EU forced companies to disclose how they are using my data!

The people that should be mocked are the EU bureaucrats that thought this was a good idea and the people that defend it.

It's a idiotic legislation that does NOTHING to protect your data. It's feel-good nonsense that EU can occasionally use as a club to extort business corporations that they want something from.

The only thing that it accomplished is to create a false sense of security in the public.

These companies are not trustworthy and neither is the EU government.

The correct solution to this problem is at the browser level and at the human level. Don't disclose information to the internet you don't want to show up on the internet.

> It's a idiotic legislation that does NOTHING to protect your data. It's feel-good nonsense that EU can occasionally use as a club to extort business corporations that they want something from.

Absolute nonsense. Tracking has to be disclosed, and is only permitted after obtaining informed consent from users. Without the law I'd have no idea what thousands of companies are doing with my data, without my consent.

I'd go for a much simpler solution. Make the cookie tracking opt-in, no popups or other barrier allowed. If the added value is supposedly so significant for users then surely those 0.1% of people will open the settings and enable cookies.

The popup is the difference between opt-out and opt-in.

Opt-out means the website loads, creates all the cookies it wants unless you find some hidden option to disable cookies.

Opt-in means the website loads, it does not create cookies, but because the website wants to create cookies it will show a popup asking permission (opt-in), because it is illegal otherwise. The website does not have to create cookies. The creators of the website could simply choose that cookies are not necessary and in that case they are not required to show any consent request. The EU cookie opt-in legislation works as intended.

We are stuck in this adversarial environment unfortunately.

> What I would like to see browsers do is grow a feature that tells web servers what uses of my data I consider acceptable, so that I don't have to waste my time every time I visit nearly every site on the entire damn Internet.

cookies are local storage. cookie prompts are you telling the server how you'd like it to instruct your client to behave. it's so weirdly roundabout: if EU wanted this regulated why didn't they just tell browser vendors that they need to implement cookie control as a 1st-party feature?

AIUI the law doesn't focus on cookies alone but on tracking. Tracking must be disclosed and the user must be able to opt-out. This includes server-side tracking such as log analysis.

If I recall correctly, Vivaldi has this feature built-in, though as part of the ad-blocking feature (the "Cookie" list is classified as "Ads", not "Trackers"). Vivaldi's list defaults to IDCAC and EasyList Cookie, though, so we'll have to see whether Vivaldi will continue to use IDCAC list or switch to other solution.

There would be very little value to a website respecting that flag if it is a significant part of revenue.

He is talking about window.dontcare not window.icare

How would asking if it's OK to store cookies when you know the user doesn't care be part of revenue?

I fully agree with you BUT you proposal is actually not allowed by the GDPR law. The legislation forbids website to trust a global setting when choosing how to handle cookies.

In other words: browsers are perfectly allowed and capable of implementing the setting, but websites are forbidden to use it.

Yep, it’s that crazy. The legislator really likes blocking banners.

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