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Europe’s cookie law messed up the internet. Brussels wants to fix it.
(www.politico.eu)
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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Privacy
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The law didn't mess up the internet, asshole business owners with their bullshit malicious compliance (and spineless devs enabling them) messed up the internet.
Yep, there even was a standard that would have been sufficient, Do Not Track. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track
Even worse, many data agencies will use the Do Not Track flag as an additional datapoint to add to your fingerprint.
This shit should be mandated, with strict “the company has been burned to the ground and the ashes have been salted” levels of penalties for violating it.
This! A thousand times THIS!
This is also evidence they never wanted to implement user protection.
For the life of me I do not understand how this was not all it took.
It wouldn't be hard to add a clause mandating that websites provide an easy-to-access "reject all" button that actually rejects all cookies.
But even when they do, I feel that, after rejecting, I get the same banner again the next time I visit the site. I bet that doesn't happen when you accept tracking.
Unless I'm very mistaken rejecting all cookies must not take more clicks than accepting them. Too bad nobody enforces that...
The law should have a bounty for reporting violations and it will basically enforce itself.
Too many websites like almost all US local news outlets and businesses like Home Depot just block all EU and Swiss IP addresses, which really sucks for a multitude of reasons.
Arguably e-privacy and gdpr require a reject all button.
I'm seeing more and more of this "pay to reject" thing and it's really annoying me
I'm pretty sure the law already said that the reject button cannot be more convoluted to access than the accept button, corporate websites just couldn't care less
Yes, because of this i skip it, blocking anyway all the crap and cookies I don't want, as also these cookie advices, only it is annoying because it last some seconds before these got skipped by the filterlist.
This works for a lot of sites:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/