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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

I want my browser to send a header:

    X-I-Dont-Give-A-Fuck-About-Cookies: true

...and let the world wide web stop torturing me. I have a nice button that clears cookies and websites can't do anything about it. This whole dance is stupid.

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A million times this.

It's easy enough to block cookies with an extension, but I'm sick of wasting time clicking the damn banners.

This should be controlled by the browser not the site. Let the site do whatever it wants to try to track, but let my browser do whatever it wants to prevent that.

...which will make it easier to websites to identify and track you.

I honestly don't mind. The popups have a far more negative impact on my life. If I actually mind, which is very rare, I just open an Incognito window.

We used to have a header for this but the tracking companies refused to play ball.

  DNT: 0

I honestly appreciate this bit of twisted propaganda. It's like you put up a barbed-wire fence with a gate in it, and people objected to the barbed-wire fence, so you put up a 1meter brick wall that people have to climb over. Whenever people complain about the wall, you say "Hey, the fence had a gate in it! But nobody wanted to play ball..."

Who put up the fence and who are the people in this analogy? I'm really confused.

It was the tracking advertisers who wouldn't play ball, so are you saying people are unfairly putting barriers in the way of tracking advertisers?

The evil bit, but meant non ironically.

But incognito will not save you. Your browser can be fingerprinted even in incognito. That's why gdpr exists. Also it's strange how your default proposed flag is in favor of tracking. Why not have a flag that is defaulted to notrack:true instead?

Sigh. Because OP doesn’t give a fuck. It’s right there.

You’re proposing DNT flag. We’ve been there, done that, it failed.

Pragmatically, the opposite flag has a better chance of being adopted, because it aligns incentives - both parties get what they want: the website can track me (and really: some people don’t give a fuck and don’t need lectures on the wrongness of their ways), I get less annoying UI.

Exactly. Don't negotiate with people who operate in bad faith.

add it to the list with

    DNT: 1

Keep in mind the cookie law doesn't just apply to browser cookies, but to other kinds of fingerprinting too. Your proposal would let you be tracked in a persistent way through canvas, localstorage and other forms of entropy easily retrieved from your browser that deleting cookies will not help against.

"Clear cookies" clears local storage, indexeddb, and the other obvious places. Of course that leaves evercookie-type tracking, but the folks using those techniques are not likely to care about about consent. And frankly you'd be better off just simply banning those techniques outright. Or better yet, make them impossible in the browser in the first place.

The "can I track you?" question does not add value.

canvas: Useless feature. Disable.

localstorage: Clear along with cookies.

entropy: Reduce observable information.

Fuck the law. Defend yourself with technical measures that actually work. You wanna make a law that helps? Give safe-haven protections to Tor exit nodes.

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