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That’s just absurd. Browsers, or User-Agents, should be where this is implemented. “This site would like to fetch external resources. Allow or Block?”. Same go

by varenc 5y ago

That’s just absurd. Browsers, or User-Agents, should be where this is implemented. “This site would like to fetch external resources. Allow or Block?”. Same goes for all those cookie prompts. Then the consent question would actually be presented in a balanced way. And the preference could be stored even if you wipe cookies. At moment if you distrust cookies, your preferences expressing your distrust of cookies is constantly being reset forcing you be re-prompted again and again. (It might be harder for regulation to require changes in browser though, and then there's legacy browsers, so I can see how we ended up here)

Fatnino 5y ago
Is it really harder to require 2-4 entities to make a change than it is to require zillions of website to do it?
- varenc 5y ago
  Fair point. It would certainly be a better world. Though constantly self-updating browsers are a relatively new thing and the legislators probably wanted to "protect" all those people stuck on IE11? And legal precedence wise, laws have been requiring things of websites for a long time, but I can't think of any legislation that has required certain behavior by browser applications themselves. Since browsers, in theory, just implement open web standards, requiring something of them is effectively legislating a forced change into web standards. That's a spooky thought. But let's be real... having individual websites ask for cookie and 3rd party request consent makes opt-out massively less popular than if this was built into the browser. If the "disable ad-targeting cookies" button wasn't hidden behind obtuse UI bespoke to each site, far far more people would opt out of them. I suspect that's a big reason why we got to this arrangement.
TheCoelacanth 5y ago
GDPR isn't about loading external resources, though. It's about tracking. The browser has no way of knowing what kind of tracking is going to happen on the server it's connecting to or what jurisdiction that data would fall under. If trackers would provide metadata indicating what kind of tracking each resource is going to do, then browsers could handle it, but trackers would never do that without being forced because they want to make opting out of tracking as painful as possible.

by varenc 5y ago

Fatnino 5y ago

Is it really harder to require 2-4 entities to make a change than it is to require zillions of website to do it?

varenc 5y ago
Fair point. It would certainly be a better world. Though constantly self-updating browsers are a relatively new thing and the legislators probably wanted to "protect" all those people stuck on IE11? And legal precedence wise, laws have been requiring things of websites for a long time, but I can't think of any legislation that has required certain behavior by browser applications themselves. Since browsers, in theory, just implement open web standards, requiring something of them is effectively legislating a forced change into web standards. That's a spooky thought. But let's be real... having individual websites ask for cookie and 3rd party request consent makes opt-out massively less popular than if this was built into the browser. If the "disable ad-targeting cookies" button wasn't hidden behind obtuse UI bespoke to each site, far far more people would opt out of them. I suspect that's a big reason why we got to this arrangement.

TheCoelacanth 5y ago

GDPR isn't about loading external resources, though. It's about tracking. The browser has no way of knowing what kind of tracking is going to happen on the server it's connecting to or what jurisdiction that data would fall under. If trackers would provide metadata indicating what kind of tracking each resource is going to do, then browsers could handle it, but trackers would never do that without being forced because they want to make opting out of tracking as painful as possible.