Comment by msm_
2 days ago
And the banners are not about cookies specifically, they are about tracking. It's illegal to track people without a lawful reason (and one of the valid reasons is user consent).
2 days ago
And the banners are not about cookies specifically, they are about tracking. It's illegal to track people without a lawful reason (and one of the valid reasons is user consent).
What are you supposed to learn from the banner anyway? It's just an additional annoyance.
You should just assume that anything that your browser exposed may be used to track you. The real problem is that most browsers and browser configurations are far too permissive for the sake of avoiding breakage. The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical, and only allowing for very limited and coarse measurement of client-side user interaction.
> The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical
As long as the web is an applications platform rather a hypertext document platform there will always be enough small differences to fingerprint. There is never going to be a technical solution, the solution is going to have to be social (legal, e.g. the GDPR).
But the GDPR does not achieve anything in practice. You get annoying cookie/tracking banners that you are effectively forced to accept in order to use the website, and companies keep collecting data. They promise not to misuse the data, but we all know that they still will. Enforcement is very difficult because it is impossible to audit every tech firm out there, so you are essentially relying on leaks and whistleblowers for the truth to come out. A complete ban on data collection not directly provided by the user would have been more effective overall, even though you still face the same enforcement issue.