>Don’t get me wrong, I admire the spirit of the law, that people should know how they are being tracked, but I don’t know why decades later after this law came

>Don’t get me wrong, I admire the spirit of the law, that people should know how they are being tracked, but I don’t know why decades later after this law came into play, nobody at Mozilla or Chrome teams thought of pushing that as a web standard, it just seems so obvious to me They did. It was called Do-Not-Track. The ad industry barely gave a care about it. Microsoft got the bright idea to make it opt-in, but they aren't iOS, so the ad industry responded by ignoring DNT entirely and that was that. The reason why GDPR plagues the Internet with maliciously designed and legally non-compliant pop-ups everywhere is because of a small exception for "user consent" as a lawful basis for data collection. I imagine the intent was for things like opting into telemetry and error reporting[0], with the idea that if someone tried to ask for consent for ad tracking it'd be rejected. The ad industry is vehemently opposed to opt-in consent because of two reasons: - People don't change defaults, so making tracking opt-out means most people get tracked while making it opt-in means most people don't get tracked. - Nobody will consciously opt-in to ad tracking, or at least they assume nobody will do so.[1] Since GDPR more or less forces ad companies and web publishers to actually provide user-visible controls for tracking, they've generally agreed upon circumventing the spirit and letter of the law by blasting people with illegal dark patterns to create a veneer of compliance. This is something the EU will need to enforce (and is doing so). The rest of this article is great, BTW - not a lot of people actually go through the effort of modifying FOSS on iOS to do what they want, and I think more people should. In fact, you might even be able to get this work upstreamed, assuming Apple doesn't have a problem with bundling anti-tracking tools like this into a third-party browser. That being said, I really wish most FOSS projects on this platform had build systems friendlier to third-party builds than Xcode projects are. The whole "wipe all the team IDs and change the bundle identifier" dance is annoying, and you always have to remember not to commit those changes in Git. I really wish we could make all that information separate from Xcode so it could be properly gitignored. [0] I generally draw a line between telemetry and ad tracking. As far as I'm concerned, using my data to improve the product I'm using is legitimate. The only concern I have there is who stores the data. Using my data to make your ad sales more lucrative is not. And I imagine if you forced users to make an educated decision they'd be more OK with the former than the latter. [1] I have heard of people who consciously prefer relevant advertising. You could pitch it to users on that basis; however, ad tracking goes way beyond interest targeting. A huge segment of the ad industry is remarketing: selling ads to people who have recently visited another website. I've found that nontechnical users find these ads to be incredibly annoying, if not creepy, but just assume there's no way to turn them off because the option to do so is intentionally buried.