The European Commission aims to reform the EU’s cookie consent rules that have cluttered websites with intrusive banners asking for permission to track user data[1]. The initiative seeks to streamline data protection while maintaining privacy safeguards through centralized consent mechanisms[1:1].
Cookie consent banners emerged from the ePrivacy Directive (Cookie Law) and GDPR requirements, which mandate websites obtain explicit user permission before collecting non-essential data through cookies[2]. Current rules have led to widespread implementation of pop-up notices that interrupt user experience and often employ confusing interfaces.
The proposed changes reflect growing recognition that the existing approach has “messed up the internet” while failing to provide meaningful privacy protection[1:2]. Rather than requiring individual consent on every website, the Commission is exploring solutions like centralized consent management to reduce banner fatigue while preserving user privacy rights.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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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.
For the life of me I do not understand how this was not all it took.
💲 and 🐑
This! A thousand times THIS!
This is also evidence they never wanted to implement user protection.
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.
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
I’m seeing more and more of this “pay to reject” thing and it’s really annoying me
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.
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/