8 ms·

Things may changes “soon” in the legislation > the absence of any option for refusing/rejecting/not consenting cookies at the same level as the one provided fo

Things may changes “soon” in the legislation > the absence of any option for refusing/rejecting/not consenting cookies at the same level as the one provided for accepting their storage constitutes a breach of the legislation [0] GO Europe GO ! [0] https://www.cnil.fr/en/edpb-adopts-final-report-outcome-cookie-banner-task-force https://www.cnil.fr/en/edpb-adopts-final-report-outcome-cook...

jonplackett 4y ago
How did they not include this to begin with? It’s so obvious as to be poking you in the eye that this would be necessary. How many cumulative wasted hours have been spent tapping through cookie pop ups? I made a game about it if you feel like wasting even more of your precious life on pop ups. http://termsandconditions.game http://termsandconditions.game
- rlpb 4y ago
  It was included. The rule hasn't been changed. The interpretation of the rule in one specific case has been confirmed, without having changed the rule. That means that, as written, this dark pattern was always illegal.
- zeven7 4y ago
  > How many cumulative wasted hours have been spent tapping through cookie pop ups? Maybe not quite as privacy conscious, but a quick workaround: (1) Open in incognito (2) Click big, easy to find "Accept" button
  - pornel 4y ago
    Note that "cookie" popups are about tracking, not cookies. If you agree in incognito, they might fingerprint your browser and track you outside of incognito too, since you've agreed.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  Thanks for that. This game should probably be mandatory, for anyone involved with the cookie legislation. If they succed, they may propose a new draft.
- lucideer 4y ago
  On one hand, this was required from the beginning (this is just a clarification of original intent, not a change or addition) However it's deeper since the popups we see today were never recommended nor required by the original regs. The laborious nonsense we endure was invented by websites as a workaround for the regs. So it wasn't obvious that consent parity would ever need to be clarified like this because it wasn't even obvious that the industry would come up with such an awful popup pattern to begin with (though in retrospect we should've known I guess). The fact the popups were never even compliant anyway is just a combination of wilful ignorance, dark patterns, consulting companies wanting to sell something and - yes - an added set of people innocently misinterpreting regulation.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    This is nonsense talk. How do you differentiate between compliance with the regulation, and a "workaround" to the regulation? I guess it's at each of our discretion, right? It's subjective? Or are they the same thing? You can keep calling them "workarounds" but that distinction only exists in your own mind.
    - unaindz 4y ago
      It's a workaround if a website manages to make users accept cookies that would otherwise refuse just by making it so inconvenient UI wise to refuse them. The limits and edge cases on this may be subjective but then again so are most laws.
    - ncallaway 4y ago
      Why do you consider something nonsense just because it’s a subjective judgement call? Lots of things are subjective judgement calls. They are not all nonsense.
      - Defletter 4y ago
        Many people sadly have this mindset that if something is not explicitly and comprehensively spelt out then anything goes, therefore any complaints for bad implementations is purely on the regulations for not being explicit and comprehensive enough. Now, obviously, there's SOME truth to this, but too often people think in black and white.
- amelius 4y ago
  > How did they not include this to begin with? A bigger question is: why didn't they go with the DoNotTrack header.
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    A bigger question is: why didn't they go with the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) header? > P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a... for more info."
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    Because the absence of a "DoNotTrack" header does not imply that a user has consented to being tracked, as a user may be using a browser that doesn't support "DoNotTrack". Nor does the setting of a "DoNotTrack" header necessarily correspond to a specific user, as it may have been set by a administrator policy. Nor would it be informed consent, as it is configured before the user has been informed as to the uses for which private data will be applied. The GDPR requires that consent be informed, explicit, freely-given, and limited to a specific use case. Of these, the "DoNotTrack" header could be at most freely-given. Its design as a binary yes/no that can be configured across all sites prevents it from ever being used as a way to grant permission to track. While the presence of "DoNotTrack=1" could be used to assume that no permission to track has been granted, this is already the default assumption that the GDPR requires companies to make.
    - amelius 4y ago
      > as a user may be using a browser that doesn't support "DoNotTrack" There are at least two solutions for that: 1. Force browsers to support the header. 2. Always send the header "DoNotTrack=boolean", then force websites to take action (show a popup) when there is no header.
- bar000n 4y ago
  i really don’t understand how it came to this anyway. the industry is so stubborn. what is not clear here? you should not spy on your site visitors for marketing purposes. when you join a poll you do so with consent, when a market/social/political research entity invites you to a focus group (for example) you get at least a coffee and snack if not real money. websites just get this for granted? it’s like stealing. it will never stop until the industry gets some understanding of these concepts.
  - marksmith2996 4y ago
    understanding is not the issue, caring is
  - imiric 4y ago
    We're talking about the advertising industry here. Calling these companies stubborn is a gross understatement. This is the industry that perfected psychological manipulation in the pursuit of profits. It's built on decades of research into the best ways to associate brand names with positive feelings, and plant a desire to make a purchase in the subconscious mind of consumers. They will do anything humanly possible to deliver ads to your senses, and they've corrupted every media technology to do so since the existence of public broadcasting. The internet has just given them the most profitable delivery mechanism, and in turn has made technology companies insanely rich. These adtech giants rule the internet, and can build the playground they need to make ad delivery more efficient than ever. Now these profits can trickle down to website owners, which will in turn take the path of least legal resistance, and employ every dark pattern imaginable in order to maximize _their_ profits. And if this corrupt business model wasn't enough, adtech companies can perpetually multi-dip by selling the data they collect on shady data broker markets. So, no, it's not just stubbornness, or lack of understanding. Deceit is built into this industry, and these cookie consent forms are just the tip of the iceberg. The solution requires much stronger regulation than the GDPR. Unfortunately, this is very unlikely to pass given the influence advertisers have on governments.
  - sumedh 4y ago
    > websites just get this for granted? it’s like stealing. Isnt the user getting free content in return?
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  It became painfully obvious over time that the people who drafted the legislation did not think through either the ways malicious compliance could work against their goals or the incentives of all actors in this story.
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    I think the possible forms of malicious compliance were considered, and are explicitly forbidden by the GDPR. The GDPR requires that consent be freely given, and be as easy to withdraw as to provide. The various end-runs around that requirement, such as redirects on rejected consent, click-through to privacy policy, click-through to a list of 3rd-parties, and so on, are all violations of the GDPR. They aren't a form of malicious compliance at all, because they aren't compliant at all.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Naively, I'd expect a lot more enforcement action if so many sites were non-compliant. Did the EU create a policy it couldn't enforce, and that's the larger issue here?
      - MereInterest 4y ago
        From the gradual ramp-up of enforcement, my optimistic view is that they are closing out the deliberate "misunderstandings", establishing precedent for each one. I really should start collecting links as they come out, as they're a pain to track down later, but they've established things like "Targeted advertising is not a legitimate interest for the purpose of Act 6, and requires consent."
- SergeAx 4y ago
  This is because their goal is to get a consent, not to give the user a choice.
dmix 4y ago
As great as that is I still don't think it will make me hate them any less which is why I love Firefox for trying to address it at the browser level. As a designer I despise mandatory content blocking modals and each one will still have a new design you have to decipher. Maybe if they clarified some design rules (2 or 3 big buttons with clearly defined text in legible colours/fonts etc) then it would be tolerable. Regardless making it always have Accept/Reject/Custom is a good step forward, even though fingerprinting and browsers like Firefox blocking 3rd party cookies by default pretty much eliminates their utility.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pvorb 4y ago
  It should just be a standard browser feature with a JavaScript API. Think of something similar to window.confirm() or a standard based on HTTP headers like Do Not Track. There could then just be a standard setting in the browser preferences and the world could be a better place again ten years from now.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    No legal measure prevents your site from seeing the Do Not Track header and automatically rejecting cookies/tracking. I've only seen a handful of sites do this. Developers inclined to respect Do Not Track seem less likely to add tracking anyway, in which case you also don't need the banner.
    - phendrenad2 4y ago
      There's also nothing stopping a website from showing a cookie banner, getting a user who clicks on "no cookies" and tracking that user anyway. Making the user click a button was always a dumb solution.
      - mindslight 4y ago
        There's also "nothing" stopping you from taking whatever you want from the grocery store without paying. Sure, shady surveillance-based businesses can still pilfer your information and sell it to illegitimate businesses regardless of the legality. But it being illegal will stop the vast majority of wanting-to-be-legitimate businesses from collecting it, and prevent the largest group of threat actors (insurance/credit/etc) from using it.
mike_hock 4y ago
What's the point of that legislation? Set your browser to block third-party cookies by default, problem solved.
- idle_zealot 4y ago
  That's a good nuclear option, but often we don't actually want to block all cookies. What we want is for sites to use cookies in ways that benefit us, but not use cookies to track us. Blocking them all or selectively allowing specifically chosen cookies puts to onus on the visitor to guess which cookies do what or lose functionality. Making the website owner legally responsible for declaring which cookies are for tracking and which provide functionality is a boon.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    The person you replied to did not say block all cookies. They specifically said block all 3rd party cookies. If a site wants to set a 1st party cookie, but through code on their end share that cookie data with 3rd party sites, there's nothing we can do about that. But by gawd we can absolutely block the ones that are too lazy to do it like that and just link someone else's codes. No banners necessary. Just block 3rd parties.
    - unscaled 4y ago
      Third party cookies aren't the only thing that's tracking you. You can be tracked by first party cookies, local storage, your IP address, browser fingerprinting and other techniques. GDPR requires websites to get your explicit consent for any kind of tracking. A lot of users are already blocking third party cookies and that's the default in Safari and Chrome nowadays - but ad companies have moved on.
      - calvinmorrison 4y ago
        I don't get it. A public site is like a public store. Do you have the expectation of privacy in a store? No not really. And be sure stores do track you.
KMnO4 4y ago
I hate that everyone benefits from GDPR and is rooting for Europe, yet very little is being done in North America.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  Whereas I hate GDPR, because all it has accomplished is making it harder to browse the web. Nothing else.
  - drooopy 4y ago
    How did it make it harder to browse the web?
  - latexr 4y ago
    No, it has very much also accomplished the task of showing you in (literal) big bright banners which websites have complete disregard for your data. If a website goes to great lengths to trick you into giving away your data, that’s a fantastic sign you should leave and never come back.
    - dcow 4y ago
      No it doesn’t. It shows you which websites are big enough to be a target and/or to have entire regulatory compliance teams that are spooked by the threat of a revenue fine to invest enough resources into implementing a horribly bad UX just to dot their “i”s.
      - latexr 4y ago
        There’s nothing in the regulation that says the UX has to be bad; quite the contrary!¹ That’s the point: the harder a service goes out of their way to make the data collection UX bad—which is harder than making it simple—the less they care about you. In addition, legitimate cookies to provide a service don’t require consent.² If you’re annoyed at the EU instead of the websites, you’ve played right into the hands of the people wanting your data for illegitimate purposes. Every time you agree to a bad cookie banner you validate their shady practices and make the web worse for everyone, including yourself. ¹ https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-reject-buttons-come https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-reject-buttons-come ² https://wikis.ec.europa.eu/display/WEBGUIDE/04.+Cookies+and+similar+technologies https://wikis.ec.europa.eu/display/WEBGUIDE/04.+Cookies+and+...
Spivak 4y ago
If they require that that no response is considered a rejection of all non-essential then we're basically done. Wow no one opted in? Shocked.
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  That's already what the law is.
Defletter 4y ago
There really needs to be some kind of addition to the law that says "Should the user have GDPR_COOKIE_CONSENT=REJECTALL, the site should act as if the user manually rejected and objected all." The fact that third party vendors are having to produce workarounds for this reeks of the kind of American tax system that insists on taxpayers manually filling out their taxes.
- PlutoIsAPlanet 4y ago
  Unfortunately this will likely just be used as a part of a unique user fingerprint generation method, similar to Do Not Track.
  - Defletter 4y ago
    That's true, though iirc your screen size and fonts are more identifiable than having Do Not Track set.
- revelio 4y ago
  "Disable cookies" was an option in the very first web browsers, so no, there doesn't need to be any addition to the law. You can disable cookies any time you want. Just don't cry when it turns out that you actually love "tracking" and need it to work for your web experience to be any good.
  - Defletter 4y ago
    Here's the thing, kiddo. For most of the time, I'm quite content with disabling Javascript and cookies altogether since it also disables subscription popups and other inconveniences when all I want to do is read an article. When you click "Reject All", you aren't rejecting literally every cookie, otherwise how would it remember that you've rejected all? Instead, "Reject All" is shorthand for "Reject all cookies that aren't strictly necessary." You are simply being obtuse. Do you also froth at the mouth whenever someone says "Universal healthcare is free"?
    - 4y ago

jonplackett 4y ago

How did they not include this to begin with? It’s so obvious as to be poking you in the eye that this would be necessary. How many cumulative wasted hours have been spent tapping through cookie pop ups? I made a game about it if you feel like wasting even more of your precious life on pop ups. http://termsandconditions.game http://termsandconditions.game

rlpb 4y ago
It was included. The rule hasn't been changed. The interpretation of the rule in one specific case has been confirmed, without having changed the rule. That means that, as written, this dark pattern was always illegal.
zeven7 4y ago
> How many cumulative wasted hours have been spent tapping through cookie pop ups? Maybe not quite as privacy conscious, but a quick workaround: (1) Open in incognito (2) Click big, easy to find "Accept" button
- pornel 4y ago
  Note that "cookie" popups are about tracking, not cookies. If you agree in incognito, they might fingerprint your browser and track you outside of incognito too, since you've agreed.
hutzlibu 4y ago
Thanks for that. This game should probably be mandatory, for anyone involved with the cookie legislation. If they succed, they may propose a new draft.
lucideer 4y ago
On one hand, this was required from the beginning (this is just a clarification of original intent, not a change or addition) However it's deeper since the popups we see today were never recommended nor required by the original regs. The laborious nonsense we endure was invented by websites as a workaround for the regs. So it wasn't obvious that consent parity would ever need to be clarified like this because it wasn't even obvious that the industry would come up with such an awful popup pattern to begin with (though in retrospect we should've known I guess). The fact the popups were never even compliant anyway is just a combination of wilful ignorance, dark patterns, consulting companies wanting to sell something and - yes - an added set of people innocently misinterpreting regulation.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  This is nonsense talk. How do you differentiate between compliance with the regulation, and a "workaround" to the regulation? I guess it's at each of our discretion, right? It's subjective? Or are they the same thing? You can keep calling them "workarounds" but that distinction only exists in your own mind.
  - unaindz 4y ago
    It's a workaround if a website manages to make users accept cookies that would otherwise refuse just by making it so inconvenient UI wise to refuse them. The limits and edge cases on this may be subjective but then again so are most laws.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    Why do you consider something nonsense just because it’s a subjective judgement call? Lots of things are subjective judgement calls. They are not all nonsense.
    - Defletter 4y ago
      Many people sadly have this mindset that if something is not explicitly and comprehensively spelt out then anything goes, therefore any complaints for bad implementations is purely on the regulations for not being explicit and comprehensive enough. Now, obviously, there's SOME truth to this, but too often people think in black and white.
amelius 4y ago
> How did they not include this to begin with? A bigger question is: why didn't they go with the DoNotTrack header.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  A bigger question is: why didn't they go with the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) header? > P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a... for more info."
- MereInterest 4y ago
  Because the absence of a "DoNotTrack" header does not imply that a user has consented to being tracked, as a user may be using a browser that doesn't support "DoNotTrack". Nor does the setting of a "DoNotTrack" header necessarily correspond to a specific user, as it may have been set by a administrator policy. Nor would it be informed consent, as it is configured before the user has been informed as to the uses for which private data will be applied. The GDPR requires that consent be informed, explicit, freely-given, and limited to a specific use case. Of these, the "DoNotTrack" header could be at most freely-given. Its design as a binary yes/no that can be configured across all sites prevents it from ever being used as a way to grant permission to track. While the presence of "DoNotTrack=1" could be used to assume that no permission to track has been granted, this is already the default assumption that the GDPR requires companies to make.
  - amelius 4y ago
    > as a user may be using a browser that doesn't support "DoNotTrack" There are at least two solutions for that: 1. Force browsers to support the header. 2. Always send the header "DoNotTrack=boolean", then force websites to take action (show a popup) when there is no header.
bar000n 4y ago
i really don’t understand how it came to this anyway. the industry is so stubborn. what is not clear here? you should not spy on your site visitors for marketing purposes. when you join a poll you do so with consent, when a market/social/political research entity invites you to a focus group (for example) you get at least a coffee and snack if not real money. websites just get this for granted? it’s like stealing. it will never stop until the industry gets some understanding of these concepts.
- marksmith2996 4y ago
  understanding is not the issue, caring is
- imiric 4y ago
  We're talking about the advertising industry here. Calling these companies stubborn is a gross understatement. This is the industry that perfected psychological manipulation in the pursuit of profits. It's built on decades of research into the best ways to associate brand names with positive feelings, and plant a desire to make a purchase in the subconscious mind of consumers. They will do anything humanly possible to deliver ads to your senses, and they've corrupted every media technology to do so since the existence of public broadcasting. The internet has just given them the most profitable delivery mechanism, and in turn has made technology companies insanely rich. These adtech giants rule the internet, and can build the playground they need to make ad delivery more efficient than ever. Now these profits can trickle down to website owners, which will in turn take the path of least legal resistance, and employ every dark pattern imaginable in order to maximize _their_ profits. And if this corrupt business model wasn't enough, adtech companies can perpetually multi-dip by selling the data they collect on shady data broker markets. So, no, it's not just stubbornness, or lack of understanding. Deceit is built into this industry, and these cookie consent forms are just the tip of the iceberg. The solution requires much stronger regulation than the GDPR. Unfortunately, this is very unlikely to pass given the influence advertisers have on governments.
- sumedh 4y ago
  > websites just get this for granted? it’s like stealing. Isnt the user getting free content in return?
shadowgovt 4y ago
It became painfully obvious over time that the people who drafted the legislation did not think through either the ways malicious compliance could work against their goals or the incentives of all actors in this story.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  I think the possible forms of malicious compliance were considered, and are explicitly forbidden by the GDPR. The GDPR requires that consent be freely given, and be as easy to withdraw as to provide. The various end-runs around that requirement, such as redirects on rejected consent, click-through to privacy policy, click-through to a list of 3rd-parties, and so on, are all violations of the GDPR. They aren't a form of malicious compliance at all, because they aren't compliant at all.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Naively, I'd expect a lot more enforcement action if so many sites were non-compliant. Did the EU create a policy it couldn't enforce, and that's the larger issue here?
    - MereInterest 4y ago
      From the gradual ramp-up of enforcement, my optimistic view is that they are closing out the deliberate "misunderstandings", establishing precedent for each one. I really should start collecting links as they come out, as they're a pain to track down later, but they've established things like "Targeted advertising is not a legitimate interest for the purpose of Act 6, and requires consent."
SergeAx 4y ago
This is because their goal is to get a consent, not to give the user a choice.

dmix 4y ago

As great as that is I still don't think it will make me hate them any less which is why I love Firefox for trying to address it at the browser level. As a designer I despise mandatory content blocking modals and each one will still have a new design you have to decipher. Maybe if they clarified some design rules (2 or 3 big buttons with clearly defined text in legible colours/fonts etc) then it would be tolerable. Regardless making it always have Accept/Reject/Custom is a good step forward, even though fingerprinting and browsers like Firefox blocking 3rd party cookies by default pretty much eliminates their utility.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pvorb 4y ago
It should just be a standard browser feature with a JavaScript API. Think of something similar to window.confirm() or a standard based on HTTP headers like Do Not Track. There could then just be a standard setting in the browser preferences and the world could be a better place again ten years from now.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  No legal measure prevents your site from seeing the Do Not Track header and automatically rejecting cookies/tracking. I've only seen a handful of sites do this. Developers inclined to respect Do Not Track seem less likely to add tracking anyway, in which case you also don't need the banner.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    There's also nothing stopping a website from showing a cookie banner, getting a user who clicks on "no cookies" and tracking that user anyway. Making the user click a button was always a dumb solution.
    - mindslight 4y ago
      There's also "nothing" stopping you from taking whatever you want from the grocery store without paying. Sure, shady surveillance-based businesses can still pilfer your information and sell it to illegitimate businesses regardless of the legality. But it being illegal will stop the vast majority of wanting-to-be-legitimate businesses from collecting it, and prevent the largest group of threat actors (insurance/credit/etc) from using it.

mike_hock 4y ago

What's the point of that legislation? Set your browser to block third-party cookies by default, problem solved.

idle_zealot 4y ago
That's a good nuclear option, but often we don't actually want to block all cookies. What we want is for sites to use cookies in ways that benefit us, but not use cookies to track us. Blocking them all or selectively allowing specifically chosen cookies puts to onus on the visitor to guess which cookies do what or lose functionality. Making the website owner legally responsible for declaring which cookies are for tracking and which provide functionality is a boon.
- dylan604 4y ago
  The person you replied to did not say block all cookies. They specifically said block all 3rd party cookies. If a site wants to set a 1st party cookie, but through code on their end share that cookie data with 3rd party sites, there's nothing we can do about that. But by gawd we can absolutely block the ones that are too lazy to do it like that and just link someone else's codes. No banners necessary. Just block 3rd parties.
  - unscaled 4y ago
    Third party cookies aren't the only thing that's tracking you. You can be tracked by first party cookies, local storage, your IP address, browser fingerprinting and other techniques. GDPR requires websites to get your explicit consent for any kind of tracking. A lot of users are already blocking third party cookies and that's the default in Safari and Chrome nowadays - but ad companies have moved on.
    - calvinmorrison 4y ago
      I don't get it. A public site is like a public store. Do you have the expectation of privacy in a store? No not really. And be sure stores do track you.

KMnO4 4y ago

I hate that everyone benefits from GDPR and is rooting for Europe, yet very little is being done in North America.

jtbayly 4y ago
Whereas I hate GDPR, because all it has accomplished is making it harder to browse the web. Nothing else.
- drooopy 4y ago
  How did it make it harder to browse the web?
- latexr 4y ago
  No, it has very much also accomplished the task of showing you in (literal) big bright banners which websites have complete disregard for your data. If a website goes to great lengths to trick you into giving away your data, that’s a fantastic sign you should leave and never come back.
  - dcow 4y ago
    No it doesn’t. It shows you which websites are big enough to be a target and/or to have entire regulatory compliance teams that are spooked by the threat of a revenue fine to invest enough resources into implementing a horribly bad UX just to dot their “i”s.
    - latexr 4y ago
      There’s nothing in the regulation that says the UX has to be bad; quite the contrary!¹ That’s the point: the harder a service goes out of their way to make the data collection UX bad—which is harder than making it simple—the less they care about you. In addition, legitimate cookies to provide a service don’t require consent.² If you’re annoyed at the EU instead of the websites, you’ve played right into the hands of the people wanting your data for illegitimate purposes. Every time you agree to a bad cookie banner you validate their shady practices and make the web worse for everyone, including yourself. ¹ https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-reject-buttons-come https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-reject-buttons-come ² https://wikis.ec.europa.eu/display/WEBGUIDE/04.+Cookies+and+similar+technologies https://wikis.ec.europa.eu/display/WEBGUIDE/04.+Cookies+and+...

Spivak 4y ago

If they require that that no response is considered a rejection of all non-essential then we're basically done. Wow no one opted in? Shocked.

TheCoelacanth 4y ago
That's already what the law is.

Defletter 4y ago

There really needs to be some kind of addition to the law that says "Should the user have GDPR_COOKIE_CONSENT=REJECTALL, the site should act as if the user manually rejected and objected all." The fact that third party vendors are having to produce workarounds for this reeks of the kind of American tax system that insists on taxpayers manually filling out their taxes.

PlutoIsAPlanet 4y ago
Unfortunately this will likely just be used as a part of a unique user fingerprint generation method, similar to Do Not Track.
- Defletter 4y ago
  That's true, though iirc your screen size and fonts are more identifiable than having Do Not Track set.
revelio 4y ago
"Disable cookies" was an option in the very first web browsers, so no, there doesn't need to be any addition to the law. You can disable cookies any time you want. Just don't cry when it turns out that you actually love "tracking" and need it to work for your web experience to be any good.
- Defletter 4y ago
  Here's the thing, kiddo. For most of the time, I'm quite content with disabling Javascript and cookies altogether since it also disables subscription popups and other inconveniences when all I want to do is read an article. When you click "Reject All", you aren't rejecting literally every cookie, otherwise how would it remember that you've rejected all? Instead, "Reject All" is shorthand for "Reject all cookies that aren't strictly necessary." You are simply being obtuse. Do you also froth at the mouth whenever someone says "Universal healthcare is free"?
  - 4y ago