Comment by jchook
1 day ago
The most frustrating thing about the cookie banner is that the solution was always obvious: just use the DNT setting on your browser (Do Not Track). It already existed.
However, powerful interest groups like ad companies that profit from your attention (which hysterically virtually powers the Internet today) were able to stop it from happening.
It was debated way back in 2009 when the GDPR was being developed. Iirc the argument was that browsers accept cookies by default so users do not get a fair consent moment. This is obviously easily fixed by regulation requiring browsers to ask users once.
Seems extremely backwards that we chose to forever darken the entire Web browsing experience just so users can "benefit" from a per-site option to let Google profit from them, with virtually zero payoff for the end user (ad relevance?).
P.S. If ad revenue is an essential pillar of Internet survival and fruition, the clear alternative seems to be sharing a fraction of that revenue with the tracked consumer.
And in a truly twisted move, ad tech companies were also using Do Not Track as part of browser fingerprinting.
This industry is a paperclip maximizer, and it needs to be dealt with accordingly.
Do Not Track cannot satisfy the GDPR, it requires that you obtain informed and specific consent so even if a user had the DNT bit set to consenting you would still need to show the banner.
Obvious move is to modify GDPR to not be so obtuse.