Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- "The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner."
Browser-based privacy controls were proposed in the late-90s/early-2000's as P3P, and were killed by corporate interests.
by nihonde - > "around 3% actually want to be tracked online"
3% of people want to be tracked online? I think it's more likely that 3% of people misunderstood the survey question
by voidUpdate - Yeah, 3% is pretty close to Lizardman's Constant - meaning the amount of people who misunderstand or give nonsense answer just because.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
by jukvalim - I dunno, the people I've talked to about it (small sample) have said they don't mind because then they get more relevant ads. It's very hard to reason with that sort of thing!by billynomates
- It probably depends on how people interpret it right? I doubt anyone is saying "I love being tracked" - but some people might choose personalized ads over anonymous ones.
I don't really use youtube natively a lot anymore, but I used to with Google's "personalised ads" turned off. I don't know if you've tried that, but the ads Google serves you if you opt out of personalised adds are sketchy, creepy and mostly not child appropriate (a lot of medical stuff, plus adverts for mail order brides etc). Back then I opted in to personalised ads because being tracked seemed a better option to me than being served inappropriate material without my consent.
Anyway, that's a long rant, but my point is, there's edge-cases and weird contexts in which I can imagine people saying something like "of the options I see as likely to happen, I'd most like to be tracked".
by benrutter - I always wondered though why a website in the eu, for the love of their users, won't just drop cookie usage and instrusive third party scripts. Just do analytics on the backend and don't set any cookie, except for tokens in authenticated areasby hollowturtle
- That's what I'm doing with a service I made. But I don't have any ads, and ad-supported websites can't easily do that.by reddalo
- They don't love you. They want to track you and make a tiny amount of money off that. Also, they want to hire cheap incompetent staff who don't understand what all the analytics shit they are putting on the website even does.by jeremyjh
- Even if you only use first-party analytics, you're still tracking users and may still pipe that data to third parties, so you still need a lawful basis for processing PII (of which consent is the least useful one).
Even the use of the word "cookie" is framing by industry to confuse people.
by bux93 - They don't want love, they want money. Tracking people is an effective way to make money. You can make some money with non-tracking ads, but these websites want more money than that.
Good websites sharing stuff for the fun of it rarely ever add these obnoxious banners. They probably should if they embed other trackers (like Youtube or Google Fonts) but often just don't. It's only the ones that want to make money off you that bother putting in the obnoxious banners.
by jeroenhd - You can't even save user preferences (like language or other settings) without showing a cookie banner. Edit: I was mistaken. You can't save inferred preferences, but can save explicit user-saved options.
And for a serious website, front end analytics are kind of a necessity to understand how users interact with pages and improve the experience. Note that it certainly doesn't require tracking the behaviour of individual users, just understanding how controls are used in aggregate.
I know it seems like you could work around this with careful design and maybe focus groups and such, but I can tell you we regularly uncover surprising insights from (aggregate) trends in front-end events.
by tempestn - > 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"
by dspillett - The "legitimate interest" bullshit is already illegal. I don't see why websites would stop doing illegal things because of this change.by jeroenhd
- This was tried before but was presumably scuppered by the market intelligence and surveillance communitiesby rusk
- It's great they're talking about it, but they should just do like California and DO something about it.[1]
> When the law takes effect in January 2027, Californians will see new privacy options in web browsers. When enabled, these controls will automatically inform websites of their privacy preferences, helping to protect personal information from being sold to data brokers and other third parties. This means they will be able to protect their data — like their browsing history, location data, purchase history, and personal interests — across the entire internet with a single step.
- And it will be largely unnoticed by site operators because who can be expected to edge case that into their logic?by TurdF3rguson
- > 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
by troupo - > Somehow, [...] couldn't be bothered
Google knows if you can set this once it's game over for their adverting business. At least with the cookie banners, there's a possibly you won't refuse every banner.
Especially those banners that only have "Accept" or "More options" with all those checkboxes to clear.
by cube00 - 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.
by tezza - They obviously aren't well-meaning if they're endlessly tracking everything you doby inigyou
- I never understood why visited websites and all their first and third party cookies are not isolated by default in browsers.
There are so few sites where I really need cross-site logins to work that an opt-in would be much more preferable.
Have all sites set cookies on whichever third party they want, but don't share those cookies over. Add an explicit "Do you really want foo.com to share data with bar.com?" if you really need to see those facebook comments on your news site.
by grumbelbart2 - That's how it works on Firefoxby albuic
- 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.by tysilva
- many will still ask because they want to track you regardless of existing preferences
- As long as it's some automated signal, the User-Agent can use any logic it wants to send it without cooperation. The specifics of how to send the signal don't have to be legislated. E.g. Firefox's Tracking Protection has a global default a site-specific overrides, so it's very likely that they would do the same for this or just combine those features.by singron
- 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?by convolvatron
- Or you could just stop spying on people.
No cookie banner is required for functionally necessary cookies.
by tomp - It’s not that easy to make a distinction between what is necessary.
- Outlawing user tracking/profiling and selling their data would be the biggest change to the internet.
- Apparently the eu official website really needs to track you then. For what’s essentially just static content. I’ll consider dropping cookies banner when their website can work without. Stop the “do as I say not as I do”
EU official website in it’s cookie banner glory: https://european-union.europa.eu/index_fr
by IMTDb