> But what value is there in constant boxes that users become accustomed to clicking through like trained monkeys? Ideally, it adds a cost to including third-p

> But what value is there in constant boxes that users become accustomed to clicking through like trained monkeys? Ideally, it adds a cost to including third-party cookies and tracking users. Editors of websites could choose to be more respectful of their visitors's data, and then they would be able to provide a more seamless experience without annoying popups. In practice, apparently they are not willing to do that, either because money brought in by privacy-violating ads offsets the cost of losing users, or because they have not given much thought to it and are already used to showing lots of popups anyway, and think that one more will not change much. > I personally think that there should be a limited, well-defined set of data that can be transmitted to ad exchanges under an assumed consent. Fully anonymised and broad demographic data (eg: age range, sex, city, etc) for example. Anything beyond that should require an explicit consent. Fully anonymised and broad demographic data does not require consent, since it does not allow identifying users. As far as I know you could store the age range of users in a cookie and give just that to your ad exchange, although you should tell them at the time you ask for their age.