Comment by zak-mandhro
3 days ago
This is incredible perspective — seriously, thank you for sharing it.
It’s fascinating (and honestly a little tragic) that a lot of the cookie chaos comes down to basic unsolved problems like "how do you remember privacy without remembering identity?" — fundamental contradictions nobody could easily patch.
It really hits home what you said about the EU approach: case-by-case "squishy" regulation vs hard-coded universal rules.
Makes me wonder if any browser-led technical solution would just end up becoming de facto case law too — basically "Chrome/Firefox/Brave do it this way, so it becomes the norm," even if regulators never mandate it formally.
If you had a magic wand: would you push for a formal browser-level privacy protocol now, or is the better play just to keep tightening enforcement against the worst actors and let good practices spread organically?
> It’s fascinating (and honestly a little tragic) that a lot of the cookie chaos comes down to basic unsolved problems like "how do you remember privacy without remembering identity?"
That's an easy answer: Do not store anything that will infringe on people's privacy for anything that's not the intended feature people use. If I' visiting an ecommerce site, there's nothing that warrants Google being aware of which product I'm clicking on.
100% agreed on the core principle — "only collect what you actually need for the feature the user is engaging with."
The frustrating part is that so much of modern web infrastructure (ad networks, analytics, personalization layers) depends on quietly hoovering up far more than the feature strictly requires.
I sometimes wonder: if browsers enforced "functional data collection only" as a technical baseline — like enforcing CORS or CSP today — how much of the tracking economy would collapse overnight?
Curious if you think real technical enforcement (browser-level) is the way forward, or if we’re stuck waiting for another round of slow, partial regulation.