The reality is very simple: I don't want any website (except those where I choose to sign-up and sign-in with a personal account) or any of its partners or whoever to save any data about me and provide any kind of "personalization" (I have even set up an extension to delete all the relevant cookies as soon as I close a page). And now I have a right to demand this yet the sites choose to annoy me by requiring to disable every piece of this crap manually before letting me in. GDPR does not allow them to just deny me entering if I don't allow tracking but it seemingly does allow them to annoy me and I'm sure they're doing it as annoying as possible intentionally.

By the way there even is a simple standardized way to know if I give my consent for tracking me or not without asking - the Do Not Track HTTP header field. That's a pity Microsoft has screwed it by turning it on by default. I wish GDPR would just require every website to respect this flag.

What you can do today:

- If your browser doesn't have this option yet, write its developers, product managers, or CEO, voicing your most humble request that they try do something that does work, at least with some pages some of the time, to try to proactively automatically agree to GDPR and cookies. (Or automatically disagree with them, discard cookies, whatever.)

I promise you that it is possible technically to do something that works on at least 1 page, that other web sites could mimic the interaction of and have it work on them too.

Sites won't all support browsers' solutions but if browsers can automate something, then some web sites can adapt to it. (By using the same interaction, names, etc - i.e. legally clicking for the user, or so that the web site can't tell if the browser sent that automated per the setting chosen by the user, or if the user manually clicked. Even if they can only automate ones that closely match certain element names etc it will still be a step ahead.)

I think you're missing the point. The operators of these sites are not interested in respecting user choice. I'm sure they're aware that the most ergonomic thing to do, and arguably the only legal thing to do, is to present users with two buttons "Yes, track me" and "No, don't track me", then provide the service with no degradation either way.

But they realise that almost nobody actually wants the tracking, and that does not align with their interests.

The thing is that the law requires exactly that. So it will be interesting to see the consequences.

They are currently just trying the waters, see what they can get away with, most certainly already have a backup plan they will enable at the first sign of trouble.

What I said applies perfectly to that case!

This may be true for most (non-tech) people, but there's a huge difference for us : we know that you can't refuse cookies and still be able to log in to an app (since cookies are used for session permanence).

The GDPR is very different : it does not prevent offering legit features by itself. So I often happen to leave a site if I'm not satisfied by their GDPR implementation and they try to force tracking on me, I won't sell my privacy that cheap if I'm given the choice. That's something I couldn't do with cookies and I just was accepting their notice blindly.