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Comment by foft | Hacker News Reader

Cookie permissions and EU advertising options should absolutely be built into the browser, it makes no sense for the user to have permissions on each site individually like this with a different system on each one.

Then the user can centrally review what permissions they gave, revoke them etc.

So no sites should have these kind of approval banners.

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Perhaps some sort of Do-Not-Track HTTP header sent by the user’s browser

It'd be especially great for a hip and cool corporation with a burgeoning browser to automatically set that header all the time, helping ensure nobody actually listens to it.

If the DNT header is absent by default, websites were happy to assume that it was okay to track users.

If the DNT header were set to "no" by default, websites would be happy to track users.

If the DNT header were set to "yes" by default, websites screamed bloody murder and pretended that it didn't represent user choice.

Thus, it needs to be backed by regulation in order to actually work

Huh, I think I agree. Not only are the banners slow, obnoxious, have a tendency to being manipulative and are different for every website, a web developer can easily ignore the user's choice and track them anyway. Apple made a big leap with the “ask app not to track” and I think browsers should have this as well. If only to get rid of those infernal banners.

I've been in Europe for almost 2 months now and started seeing the GDPR banners a lot more often. I've yet to feel like I'm missing anything by either clicking reject all, or by avoiding the site if I can't reject all non-required cookies in a few clicks.

I think the closest we are going to get to that is the Consent-o-matic plugin, where you set your permissions centrally and it automatically fills in the forms for every web site it can.

And that leads through to another tip to make your consent request less obnoxious - make sure that plugins like Consent-o-matic do actually work correctly and invisibly with your site.

That'll probably be the death of analytics. Nobody wants cookies, given the option.

Good

It already is. But it makes it too easy to say no, so Websites don't respect it.

Firefox lead the way! Google wont want to do it unless forced.

Let's hope the EU mandates this to end the current madness. No idea why they didn't do so in the first place.

They used to be. Browsers used to give you pop up alerts whenever a website wanted to store a cookie.

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