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Comment by IMTDb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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