That design is still broken. There should be a Reject All option. Irrespective, here's the fundamental problem – the whole thing is about a technical detail –

That design is still broken. There should be a Reject All option. Irrespective, here's the fundamental problem – the whole thing is about a technical detail – cookie – rather than meaningful outcome for the user. A modern online app has to keep shared inter-related state on client-side and server-side and persists for several months and use that state for doing various things like security, abuse prevention, personal preferences (and other types of automated personalisation), monetary incentives optimisations (free-trial, limited offers, conditional offers etc.). Then there is commercial product ads cost optimisation based on expressed and inferred interests of the users. IMO, all this should be okay. But then what is not okay? – The line between personalisation vs discrimination is a thin one. In ecommerce, insurance etc – there are regulations restricting price personalisation to protect consumer interests. In other domains, different users can get different experiences and those decisions are opaque to the consumer. Then there is targeted psychological manipulation at scale. People have instinctual fear/discomfort about companies amassing longitudinal demographic/behavioural data associated with their PII data. There is a real risk of companies using that data against users interests in both direct material and indirect non-material ways. Companies have a motive to increase their profits and without guardrails they will go to extremes in seeking profits that will hurt the users. There are a lot of examples of insidious behaviour – they may want to cover up flaws that could be harmful to humans/animals directly or harm environment and hence harm humans/animals indirectly, flaws that render the product useless and hence cost them support costs or be forced to recall the product etc. Recently, I was shocked to learn about how lead being mixed into petrol/diesel in US was marketed effectively for decades. With the power of big data, how much more effective such a campaign would have been. (It is easier to look at an example from decades ago more objectively than an example from our current time). There have been information wars in all ages – in the age of verbally narrated stories, then stage drama with touring companies, then printing press, then telegraph, then broadcast radio, then distributed cinema, then broadcast tv, then broadcast cable tv, and now Internet. The different between all the previous ones and Internet today is the speed, intensity and effectiveness of it at scale. That's what makes it much more scarier than all those previous attempts. In this context, fighting cookies is a very nice strawman distraction.