Bonus pro-tip: Firefox for Android supports uBlock Origin, which means you can get rid of these godawful banners on mobile, too. Only iOS users are stuck having to put up with them.
It should be but it's not.
Protecting users is the browser's job:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cooki...
(privacy law and how it relates to customer user experience is a component of my work in finance)
> if it turns out orgs are not respecting the action, it'll end up in a class action or other legal event eventually
Not a chance.
Yes. For a subset of "these websites". Because this is enforced and EU has fined billions already. The fines for doing what you say they do, are steep and a severe risk for many "these websites".
So for websites that are not in that subset, they will still track you regardless of what you click on, so you still need browser-level protections for those websites, and those browser-level protections will also work on the websites that are in that subset, so you still gain nothing by clicking the No.
Edit: what I'm trying to say is: this "technical" problem has a real and working "solution" that's not technical at all: law and enforcement. Now, that won't work for all and everything, it never does. There will always be malicious, scammy, malware, criminal and illegal webservices around. But it makes it very hard for malicious actors to do so and make money.
> Now, that won't work for all and everything, it never does. There will always be malicious, scammy, malware, criminal and illegal webservices around.
Yeah, exactly. So if I have to protect myself from those websites anyway, I may as well apply the same protections to all websites. Clicking the "No" does nothing for me.
And what is the protection?
We do not materially benefit from this in any way, nor do we market it. I am not a spokesperson for my company nor do I want to be publicly identified with it. I'm advocating here because you said "not a chance" but there is a chance.
It's not just that we are worried about some sort of regulatory enforcement, either, although existence of such regulations does help convince the less scrupulous people from pursuing a bad path.
The free internet is built on ads. I still believe in the free internet. I still think we can make it work. I welcome regulation and regulatory enforcement even though it's hard for a small outfit like us, because it reduces the chances that our ad tech has to compete with less scrupulous people. I think we've survived as a small outfit since roughly the dotcom era because we've tried to be good stewards. People wouldn't need uBlock if there was better regulation/enforcement, and companies like mine, who are trying to do the right thing (even as we operate in the loathed ad space), would benefit.
I'm worried about AI on this front because it means in the future your ads will be served up to you out of a black box instead of out in the open where we can all inspect who is trying to get what from us (and block bad parties via eg uBlock), and, to a degree, who is trying to shove what down our throats.
And ads don't require pervasive and invasive tracking. The industry made us all believe they do.
Check your internet bill, it might not be free after all.
I'd very much rather get back to the internet being about connectivity and nothing else. The internet would survive just fine by providing a means to contact authorities, companies and each other, without any of the "content" for which we supposedly need ads to produce
Global Privacy Control (GPC) is the modern alternative, and the mechanism by which California's privacy legislation / CCPA is largely handled from a technical perspective. Unfortunately it is not available by default in Chrome, but it is in eg Firefox / DuckDuckGo browser. Because it has legal teeth, it has more power to give you a tracking free experience even if a company had the technical capability to track you.
It can still help you even if you're not in California because geolocation is not perfect, but it does provide the ability to monetize ads that are tracking free. The threat of enforcement has to be real and continue to be demonstrated, though, or it won't last.
iCloud Private Relay also causes tracking companies a lot of real pain (sort of a mini-Tor where Apple and CloudFlare each have only half of your unlock key), but it's a technical bandaid with a variety of flaws that can break many legitimate things.
Ultimately each situation is one that requires judgement, which is why I think a legislative/judicial answer is the only one that ultimately holds up. GPC allows for a little more nuance than DNT. People care about the intent of respecting "Do Not Track." It some cases it may requirement a judgement about whether or not a company violated that request, not whether it was "technically impossible for the company to violate that request (we thought) but oh oops it was possible...I guess that just means we need to make it harder, the company doing the violating was okay because they worked within the bounds of what was technically possible."
A company that violates this privacy, especially when you've indicated that you do no consent, should have to face penalties. And because we expect some companies to go out of business for violating these rules, we should also make sure that their "data assets" aren't simply transferred to some new company in bankruptcy court when an adverse ruling comes down.
The internet I remember had free content because mostly individuals wanted to share something. Commercial offers were rare. I would be very happy to go back to that network, with 90% content gone and the remaining 10% provided without an ads driven model. In fact, if it was for me, one could widely ban most advertising also off-net. It is manipulative cancer. At least ban any sort of user tracking and analysis. Yes, this will kill a wide spectrum of offers. I am totally fine with that trade-off. We don’t need it for a well-functioning society. And yeah, look around, we do all sorts of interference with so-called free markets, because history has shown time and time again how horrible it gets when you allow capitalism to roam freely.
Doesn't mean people implement it correctly though
You can configure the "Cookie Autodelete" extension to behave in a similar way.
Worth it IMO but I really wish there was a better way to submit bug reports than creating an account on their site. Fuck that dark pattern
https://i.imgur.com/QnedRVZ.png
Also, how's that compare to Consent-O-Matic in terms of effectiveness,safety (i.e. that it doesn't mangle the wrong thing on the site) and performance?
> Also, how's that compare to Consent-O-Matic in terms of effectiveness,safety (i.e. that it doesn't mangle the wrong thing on the site) and performance?
Dunno. I've never had any problems with it. All it does is hide the cookie banner DOM elements.
It is a very rare for me to see a site that's broken by ublock origin.
I've been using it on my Mac M1 and I only notice the memory footprint when I have > 30 - 40 tabs open.
Still works for me to this day, but this option might get axed come June 2025.