The other approach to killing the cookie banner is simply to declare that such a thing cannot constitute “informed consent”. (Perhaps: “ticking a checkbox and/or clicking a button cannot constitute informed consent”; and see what they try next.) From a factual perspective, I honestly think that shouldn’t be controversial: it’s well-understood that very few people actually read those things, they just want to get them out of the way. Just as shrink-wrap licenses and even simple contracts have at times in some jurisdictions essentially been neutered, so that only terms that a reasonable person would expect to be there are enforceable, at which point it becomes obvious that the whole thing needs tearing down in favour of standard licenses/contracts. In the Australian state Victoria, for example, there are standard rent and property sale contracts; for renting you must use that contract <https://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/housing/renting/starting-and...>, and I got the impression that residential sales practically always use the standard contract.
But of course it’s impossible to convince someone of something when their livelihood depends on their not understanding it.
> Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner.
So lawmakers do know how to make legally binding preferences based on device settings? What a crazy innovation.. now if only parents were given these options to indicate their child is using a device.. we could do away with all this Online Safety Act nonsense...
Don't fall for the "we are just stupid" propaganda, which is used constantly by governments acting in bad faith.
Browsers already had settings for deleting cookies. There was never a reason for banners whose only function was pulling the ladder up from smaller competitors and concentrating power in the hands of an oligopoly that could siphon data directly from the OS.
This coupled with a law mandating ISPs provide a "change IP on demand" feature would have given users a sort of "Tor light" level of privacy. Strong privacy is trivial to achieve for a government that doesn't have a conflicting goal of total surveillance.
I think it's because every single website breaks if you don't allow cookies at the browser level. Some knowledge of what the specific cookie does was necessary.
changing IP is not really enough for privacy, there is many ways to fingerprint your machine/browser and uniquely identify you across networks
The problem there is that parent's won't know how to do it, or won't care. Many can hardly operate the most user-friendly phone, let alone manage accounts.
The online safety acts and its EU counterparts are somewhat risky, but nobody wants the mention the only proper alternative: a total ban on "social media." Not just for kids, but for everyone. Or a ban on smart phones, that would work too, at least short term. But: money.
> The problem there is that parent's won't know how to do it, or won't care.
This is unfortunately the reality.
The other day a friend asked me to help her make her phone safer for her kids to use. I started by asking if she set permissions on the apps she downloaded. She looked at me blankly, "What permissions?". I proceeded to show her how you can granularly control what you allow each app to do on your phone and what access it is allowed. Her head blew up, she had no idea any of this existed and after gong through a few menus, she didn't care any more. It was all too complicated and too much to think about for a busy mum.
This is why governments unfortunately are having to try to protect people from themselves. As tech competent people it all seems so simple to us, but we need to remember the majority of the population just click 'Allow All' and blow past all permission and security questions as they have no idea what any of it means.
"is this device for you, or a child" is one of the first options when setting up an iphone.
I haven't set up an Android in a while, but, I doubt it's massively different.
Yeah but most parents devices are for them, they just let their kid use it too.
Make the default "allow none" or "child-safe" and then if the parent does nothing that's what they get.
When we buy a new phone, the configuration process should ask if the device will be used by a kid. Easy and simple.
When restoring factory defaults, the same question, just in case the phone is sold, gifted, stolen or whatever.
If you are going to give a phone to a minor you should set that option right from the start.
It's ok if parents won't care. It's a choice too.
Yes, you can't make parents care, but make it easy for the ones who do, and you'll also pick up some number of those who care but only if it's not too difficult. There's no reason a parent should have to set permissions separately in 10 differents apps on a child's device.
That’s not true. Every TV app has a parent setting. That’s really easy to use browser support profiles just like TV apps do bad. UX doesn’t mean that it can’t be set up easily for parents. Windows itself could have profiles for kids that has all this set automatically. It’s not hard. There’s just no will to do it.
> There’s just no will to do it.
Exactly. The problem is its from the parents side.
That's why the setting should be on the device, not the browser or individual apps. One setting that you could even get pre-configured when you buy the phone.
It still doesnt solve the problem of the millions of parents that just dont care.
Why should I care that they don't?
More parents will care if you make it easier.
A child can still access knives if the parents don't care.
>>>>>>> now if only parents were given these options to indicate their child is using a device.. we could do away with all this Online Safety Act nonsense...
THIS
Holy shit. This is such an obvious fix. And it shuts up those surveillance state goons immediately.
My God, why have we tried to summon up the ghost of 1984 when such a simple fix as this will do.
Parents can lock devices into "child mode" that emits "user is child" headers. Websites can then block.
The blast radius is zero.
Good God, we need to fast track this into browsers right now. If we hurry we might be able to point to this as the technical fix.
Once some of the infrastructure exists, OS vendors can hook into it.
Firefox devs - please do this right now. Please spearhead this.
I might have to vibe code an advocacy site for the spec and set up a GitHub / RFC process.
I agree, and I agree with the enthusiasm on which you bring in.
I've long since considered that the efforts for online child safety should be pointed at educating parents and spearheading some kind of certification of compliance for child safety of software and websites.
[this product is certified to adhere to EU:CSA]
Then you can block everything not certified, and the software that does the blocking would also be certified, the two major prongs you need (endpoints and sites working together: else they're blocked). The rest of the money goes to education for parents about this fact, and the dangers of not doing it, and how to do it.
This is super "easy" (when comparing to the effort it would take for putting backdoors in everything).
Which is why I think that the reason is definitely not child safety, and more about crime control.
Me talking about UK blocking people unless they ID themselves in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979295
Me talking about how its disingenuous because we have superior technical solutions to this particular issue last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010902
California AB1043, in other words
Make a website about that. I’ll spread it.
> automated signals that would communicate your privacy preferences between your device and websites or apps0
Sounds good, as long as it covers the "legitimate interest" bollocks⁰ that is often hidden in inconvenient UI nests as well as the basic preference.
-------
[0] "we see your preference not to be stalked, but we want to anyway, click again for every partner to reconfirm you don't want them following you around"
This was tried before but was presumably scuppered by the market intelligence and surveillance communities
> Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner. Unfortunately, the tracking industry is pushing back – and so far, they’ve been successful.
> ...
> You may think that EU privacy law requires cookie banners. But the law is clear: online tracking is prohibited by default.
That's an excellent idea... lets see how its implemented on https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en
Oh... there's a cookie banner.
Wow, finally. This would be a major quality of life update for browsing the web. As others have stated, not all sites merit the same preferences. Hopefully they can adapt a middleground of default settings with the ability to customize site by site.
under what circumstances as user would I want to explicitly agree to have my browsing history sent to tens or hundreds of third party tracking aggregators?
I've seen people argue, with a straight face, that they prefer to get ads that are "relevant to them". Including here on Hacker News.
I don't disagree. The ideal state here is really layers of customation for the defaults. Options like reject all, or strictly necessary would be at the forefront. And then it's really up to the individual how they want to proceed when those options are not available.
If offered something in return, I guess
Devil's advocate argument: if they were giving you something in return, and that could be cash, but it might also be "you can have this content for free".
In the UK a few news sites have changed cookie banners to "you can accept and see this stuff for free, or you can sign up for a subscription, which would you prefer?". It's the only time I hit accept (and then clear browser history).
If blanket preferences from browser signals became the norm, a segment might open up where you would configure preferences and a data broker would make sure you get something in return for your data. At minimum it might force paywalled publishers to consider that as a "lite" subscription option.
That's been ruled illegal in the EU, but EU sites still do it. Basically, the consent exception only applies if the user isn't coerced into it. Because coerced consent isn't consent.
> but it might also be "you can have this content for free".
ads don't require invasve and pervasive tracking
As I understand it, it is the position of several DPAs that denial of access entirely (i.e. "consent or pay") could contravene the "freely given" requirement of GDPR in most cases, though this has thus far not been tested in court.
(see e.g. https://iapp.org/news/a/cjeu-clarifies-cookie-consent-requir... https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/edpb-consent-or-pay-models-s... )
Sometimes I do it to reward the website for being less shit than most websites.
Ask that question to the 99% of people who click 'Allow All' on cookie banners.
Its the biggest button.
They did not read the text to agree.
It was the fastest way to get the banner to go away. Sometimes they force you to confirm multiple times if you click ”none” or ”minimal”.
Even well meaning bodies like TFL (Transport for London) have cookie warnings that impede the actual access of the website.
Need to look up a bus time? Full screen cookie consent with accept buttons drawn OFF THE SCREEN.
They obviously aren't well-meaning if they're endlessly tracking everything you do
Also there's a big difference between the sites that easily allow you to simply reject whatever their premade cookie settings are. And, the sites that only allow you to use them after you've accepted (example, politico.eu). Or, the sites that do have a 'reject' option, but you have to click through multiple screens and then manually reject each individual option.
Sites that easily allow you to simply reject everything are then a short hop, skip and a jump into browser settings where you auto-reject all cookie/tracking nonsense
Nice try but it won’t work, unless they were to also make it illegal to diversify the experience based on these settings and periodically but consistently issue massive fines to those who do (or who ignore such settings), which unfortunately ain’t happening.
An easier step forward could be to make the too often present ridiculous use of dark patterns and endless process to express your lack of consent illegal (and issue colossal fines…)
And guess who makes the most of devices and the most popular browser, I already see post install "Get most of the browsing experience by agreeing to these defaults."
What does enforcement of not having these banners look like? Wha tif people just... didn't.
I still don't get why every website has a cookie banner by default. I am data controller for several companies and have lots of exposure to GDPR. All my websites have no cookie banner, as they are not required.
I guess that most companies just chuck it up there as a default so they dont have to read the law, or maybe they are all actually harvesting and selling personal data and therefore require cookies? Who knows.
Don't underestimate the argument of "just to be on the safe side". Someone running a business who doesn't know a lot about cookies will often just put a banner on as an easy arse covering mechanism even when not required.
Let businesses who don't know what they're doing be outcompeted by businesses who know what they're doing.
Or they had their site developed by an agency and the cookie banner is just part of their standard scaffolding for a new site.
> I guess that most companies just chuck it up there as a default so they dont have to read the law
I think most companies just don't give a fuck about user privacy and therefor have to show one. There are of course exceptions. But I don't know how many of them have been actual (for-profit) companies.
If you use social media pixels, ad tracking, or performance analytics tools like Google Analytics a cookie banner and consent is required. If not, then not.
> I guess that most companies just chuck it up there as a default
50% that, and 50% that way more companies than you expect are harvesting and profiting from your data.
> I guess that most companies just chuck it up there as a default so they dont have to read the law, or maybe they are all actually harvesting and selling personal data and therefore require cookies?
That has been my guess as well. If you run npm install half-the-internet you have no idea what's in there, so just slap on that cookie banner for good measure. Of course the real problem is not knowing what's inside your application, but the thought process is "eh, if a blanket cookie banner does the job then that's good enough for me".
I’ve made a few sites for work that aren’t our primary focus. The sites used cookies for login and for “required purposes” (storing in progress state). We did all the tracking on the backend, no cookies or client side trackers.
On our go-live form there’s a question “do you use cookies” and it’s yes/no. If you say yes legal block the site from going live without the pre approved cookie banner…
> We did all the tracking on the backend
Just checking, you do know that still counts as tracking and may fall under GDPR rules? GDPR was never just about cookies.
I do but we shouldn’t be talking about cookies in our cookie banner then.
It's a "Dick over".
Usually government mandating something is concerning cause it seems to favor the government for its existence. However with EU commission its actually interesting combination, its representing multiple individual governments at once which somehow works good for the citizens.
Overall this is a common sense solution. The challenge is that a significant industry makes money by collecting and selling data. It makes it harder for businesses who depend on it, they are going to get creative and will eventually come up with some dark pattern to circumvent it.
The insanity around cookie banners is a good target.
> Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner.
Fortunately, if you have uBlock Origin, you can enable Easylist cookie notices under annoyances and avoid most of them. Combine with blocking third-party cookies, and the problem pretty much disappears.
The fact that the EU tried to regulate this stuff is a shame, because regulation is not a good remedy. End-users have agency here. The solution is to enable end-users to have control in their browser (which they always did, so it's an issue of education, like so many things).
Shame that Google is trying to kill uBO though. Extremely pleased that Brave continues to support it.
If it's not cookies, it will be something else. IP addresses, tracking pixels, browser fingerprinting.
The Do Not Track header is the only technology needed. The rest is compelling companies to obey it.
Didn't know that about Brave, but it's moot for me since Firefox also supports it and these days I find that Firefox is the better experience, not Chrome or even Chromium.
uBlock Origin with all "annoyance" filters enabled. I haven't seen a cookie banner in years.
Another good one to have the "hide Youtube shorts" filter, featured on HN a while back.
There is Consent-O-Matic.
Also I wanna know when websites don't give a shit about my privacy and therefor have to show a cookie banner. While theoretically not consenting should mean not collecting blocking it altogether and modifying page content might mean "all bets are off". If the website expects you to have made a decision that might wrongly consider it consent.
Consent-O-Matic says "I don't consent".
As if the DNT thingy didn’t exist…
DNT tried to do this without any legal backing which was obviously stupid.
Yes please!
> he EU Commission finally proposed a solution to the cookie banner problem: automated signals that would communicate your privacy preferences between your device and websites or apps.
It wasn't on EU Commission to "finally propose a solution". The soluton has always been there.
Somehow, Google, aka world's largest tracking and advertising company incidentally making the worlds' dominant browser and completely dominating all web standards, couldn't be bothered, and instead was pushing crap like FLoC
or we could glass the continent
Keep fighting! For now: browser plugins.
is there a specific one you would recommend?
uBlock Origin -> allows blocking dialogs (legally implies refusal of everything not necessary, because you don't agree to something requiring agreement)
Consent-O-Matic -> automated configuration to your preferences using the dialog provided.
I still don't care about cookies -> least privacy friendliest option, because it may opt into undesired tracking (its goal is just to remove the annoyance of the dialogs)
I use "I still don't care about cookies"; it works well, but I don't have a current comparison to other options.
Doesn't this lead to an all-or-nothing approach?
I don't want randomnewssite to track me. But a favorite online store...I do want help with recommendations.
You would presumably be logged in to your favorite store site, and they would be using your identifying session to make recommendations, not anonymous tracking cookies.
Eh, maybe.
It's easier to click a single button than hunt for how to create/access an account for the brand.
Then sign in, thats enough signal for them to track you
Just disable cookies on your browser by default, and enable it for the sites that you need to log in to.
Ironically, this has the effect of cookie banners reappearing every time because they cannot place a cookie that says that you have rejected them.
Malicious compliance. You do not need a cookie to "store" the fact you have rejected them. They can simply assume you have rejected them from the lack of cookies. They can store a cookie once you (have gone out of your way to) accept them.
Unless disabling cookies means treating all cookies as session cookies (meaning you can still be followed within a session), this has the fun side effect of breaking pretty much every CAPTCHA firewall like Anubis, Cloudflare Turnstile, and any other that relies on cookies.
Unfortunately this means you have to view a lot of the web through archive.today or web.archive.org - I would know because I have uMatrix configured this way.
you can be tracked without cookies - the cookie dialogs are about tracking and processing of personal data in general.
-> not really sensible
Just configure your browser to ask for cookies for that store only?
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The EU has been on a decade-long crusade to destroy the internet.
I think you'll find that's Google and Meta.
Just step back and ask yourself what each side of that debate is trying to achieve and why. What is motivating them? Why are they motivated in that way?
Don't just recite what you "know", think, look, research, figure it out. It might sound good to have a one-liner like this in your back pocket, but do you really believe it after looking at the publicly available information that it is their real intention to conduct a "crusade to destroy the internet"?
Advertisement has been on a decade-long crusade to destroy the internet.
You mean: the planet.
(because it drives consumerism)
OK yank.
This is conflating different things. They are trying to use people's annoyance with the banner THEY caused to build support for another legislation.
Cookies were never a problem. Just get rid of the banner.
This other legislation should pass/fail on its own merit.
No, please don't!
It's great. The current law forces people that don't give a shit about user privacy to have a banner (or any other way of asking for consent first) while giving everyone that cares and everyone not wanting to spy on their visitor a free pass.
People click yes too often because it's the easier way to make it go away. This new thing could actually result in a 0% tracking cookie consent rate, effectively making them illegal.
> From a factual perspective, I honestly think that shouldn’t be controversial: it’s well-understood that very few people actually read those things, they just want to get them out of the way
There’s no way this would fly. “I didn’t read it” can’t possibly be an excuse to avoid being bound by an agreement. Every party to an agreement that flaunted its terms, even though they took advantage of the benefits granted by it, would invoke it as a defense, and it’s irrefutable. The system would completely fall apart if this happened.
There’s a balance that needs to be carefully managed here. Yes, fairness to consumers is important. But you can’t destroy the incentive to produce value in so doing.
> “I didn’t read it” can’t possibly be an excuse to avoid being bound by an agreement
Only engineers have trouble understanding this. It can be a reasonable defense, and it has successfully been used in courts of law many times. The law is not a machine that compiles text like code literally. Imagine someone who coerces a dying or sick person to sign an agreement they couldn’t possibly be in a reasonable state of mind to understand what they were doing -- the law can and does invalidate such “contracts”. That is the same principle behind age of consent laws. The law could theorerically (and does) invalidate “agreements” which no one is reasonably expected to read and understand.
I am an attorney, and am aware of these exceptions. But these are exceptions and not the general rule, which is what I am speaking of.
EULAs are restricted in power in EU and at least to me these cookie banners are similar in spirit.
"I didn't read it," sure. But, "A reasonable person would not read it?"
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Of you need a nonstandard contract then you need to provide proof that it was understood. These are not provided in a context where I would expect anyone reading it to have a lawyer to advise so they obviously don't understand it
By that same logic, do you believe ignorance of the law is a valid defense to a criminal charge? Laws are also written by lawyers.
> There’s a balance that needs to be carefully managed here. Yes, fairness to consumers is important. But you can’t destroy the incentive to produce value in so doing.
The value is derived from the people consuming the product. Placing the "incentive to produce value" above the people who presumably are the source of this value seems...misaligned.
If there’s no product to be consumed, there’s no value produced either. That’s the point: it’s harmful to eliminate the incentive to produce.
People will _always_ need things. There are very few things that will eliminate people's need for things and producers will of course adapt to the environment.
What we need is an environment that does not give the producers asymmetric power over consumers and the products will naturally align with that.
* definition of bad is subjective and may vary depending upon which lobby group has the most cash to throw around
That argument has actually worked in some cases, especially when you need to click away to actually access the document. I assume it's why we see more and more examples where you need to scroll the full body of text in order to "agree".
Websites need cookies. I don't get why I have to suffer through this for a few puritans who literally lose nothing in the process of this transaction but act as if Stasi is watching them.
Session cookies do not require a banner.