We _don't_ need that law. All it's resulted in is tons of annoying pop-ups all over the web (which I block with an extension). Browsers already have the ability to grant or deny cookie usage per-domain, which is much more user-friendly and effective.
> nor GDPR
No technically-enforceable permissions system in the world will let you control what a company does with data you've already voluntarily given them, so I don't see how better permissions would eliminate the need for GDPR.
> But one idea I have is where sites have to send metadata down (as part of the headers if like?) with each page stating what permissions that page requires to function
Sounds like you're describing [Content Security Policy][1] and [Feature Policy][2]? Obviously those aren't required by default, for backwards-compatibility reasons, but they _do_ exist.
> That way users can see what each page is doing just be looking at the requested permissions even before any popup appears
Can you clarify what you mean by this? Most of the permissions you described are very low-level; not the sort of thing most users would want to concern themselves with (and certainly not for every site they visit).
> Further to that, you can define in the browser which permissions to allow by default - this is a little like what is available already but more granular (eg the self-modifying page example earlier).
Again, most of this seems like the sort of thing users wouldn't want to concern themselves with. What benefit would result from users being able to prevent a page from modifying its own DOM, for example? For permissions that actually impact the user's security or privacy (e.g. Camera, Mic, Clipboard, Cookies, Third-Party Cookies) this already exists. (See chrome://settings/content)
Could you give some more examples of permissions you believe would be valuable to include here? Preferably stuff that has a clear, concrete impact on the user's security or privacy.
> Further to that, some interactions (the exploitable ones) will be logged. eg calls from one domain to another. So some of the more experienced users have the ability to scan for suspicious behaviour without having to trawl through thousands of HTTP get / post requests.
Is this really such a common use case that you think this needs to be built-into the browser rather than handled via an extension or Dev Tools?
I'd also like to point out that in the case of cross-domain calls, a site which wants to hide their behavior could simply proxy calls to third-party sites through their own server.
> I'd also like reminder prompts. eg if a service you allowed to make location requests does it frequently, I'd want a banner across the bottom of the page reminding users that this is happening frequently and that can only be mitigated by "trusting" that service with that API (an additional manual action on top of allowing it initial access to a particular browser feature).
Already exists. Browsers show an icon in the address bar and on the tab when a page is accessing sensitive information like your mic, camera, or location. Mobile browsers display a persistent notification.
> Another cool feature would be if versioning was built into webpages. Each page would be versioned and that version number would stored with a checksum of the page. Thus if the page changes between refreshes, the browser knows and resets all the permissions on that page to the user defaults (ie any previous prompts would then have to be re-prompted again).
So every time a site make some minor update to their code, I'd have to re-authorize all permissions on that site? Seems rather inconvenient to me, and might lead to warning blindness (which would decrease overall security). That said, the upcoming [Web Packaging Standard][3] might do the "versioning" part of this at least.
> It would also be nice to have some definable CPU and memory caps too - since each tab is basically now a virtual machine.
I'm not sure this is something the user really wants to micromanage. If a tab I'm using needs to use 100% of my CPU to do its job, I don't think I'd want it to bother me with a prompt; I'd much rather just see an indicator or something indicating high resource usage so I can intervene if necessary. With the recent rise of JS-based cryptocoin miners; something like this may end up getting implemented in the near future.
> Thus all I ask is you respect the spirit of what I'm saying rather than taking the points literally as a written gospel I'm suggesting we implement tomorrow. There will be problems implementing that verbatim but my point is to illustrate just how little protection the web offers and how much further we need to go given its current nature is basically just allowing anyone to run any untrusted application on their local machine.
Thanks for the reminder. I've gone back over all my points in this post and tried to re-imagine your suggestions in the most constructive way possible.
Sorry if I still seem skeptical. You have some good ideas, but keep in mind that these problems have already been considered in detail by numerous standards committees and browser vendors, so it's no surprise that a lot of the things you've suggested either already exist, or have good reasons for not existing.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP
You also made a point that some users might not what those options and frankly thats irrelevant if your aim is robustness, which you keep harping on about.
However I agree that there will have been some bad ideas there and some which need more fleshing out. You were basically asking me to do the work of hundreds of people over the last 20 years by myself in one evening. A point I did emphasise in that post in fact :)
Re GDPR and cookie laws, I was using that to illustrate how bad the problem had gotten. I don’t agree with the cookie concent law either but I do disagree with your point about GDPR. There are measures you can do to mitigate data collection (or at least the current modes) but You’re definitely right that it’s imposs to prevent entirely.
> What more would you add? The existing permissions system on the web seems to be very granular to me.
It's disjoined, inconsistent and insecure by default. If it was as robust as you make out then we wouldn't have a need for the cookie consent law nor GDPR (opinions of the EU and those respective laws aside).
I honestly don't think web can have a robust permissions system given its current architecture. I think it would need a ground up redesign - or at the very least it would need to make breaking changes. But one idea I have is where sites have to send metadata down (as part of the headers if like?) with each page stating what permissions that page requires to function. Eg: make outbound JS requests to it's own site, to other sites. To save cookies on it's own domain, or other domains. Which hardware it has access to. Whether it uses local storage. Whether it's allowed to write HTML into it's own page. etc. This will be a bit like the XML file that includes Android APK files and tells the JVM which APIs you are using (but not as shitty). So if the page doesn't declare it needs access to something in the metafile, then it simply doesn't get access to do that. That way users can see what each page is doing just be looking at the requested permissions even before any popup appears requesting access to xyz.
Further to that, you can define in the browser which permissions to allow by default - this is a little like what is available already but more granular (eg the self-modifying page example earlier). You can define those policies as "Never allow", "Request authorisation", or "Allow" and the authorisation with be on a per-domain basis (again, like some browsers already do). The benefit there is you now have all of your Javascript, cookies, etc permissions wrapped up in one centralised ACL and an easy way of seeing what each web page/application wants to do even before a request popup appears on your screen.
Further to that, some interactions (the exploitable ones) will be logged. eg calls from one domain to another. So some of the more experienced users have the ability to scan for suspicious behaviour without having to trawl through thousands of HTTP get / post requests.
I'd also like reminder prompts. eg if a service you allowed to make location requests does it frequently, I'd want a banner across the bottom of the page reminding users that this is happening frequently and that can only be mitigated by "trusting" that service with that API (an additional manual action on top of allowing it initial access to a particular browser feature).
Another cool feature would be if versioning was built into webpages. Each page would be versioned and that version number would stored with a checksum of the page. Thus if the page changes between refreshes, the browser knows and resets all the permissions on that page to the user defaults (ie any previous prompts would then have to be re-prompted again). This would cause issues for content that's dynamically generated on the server side (eg forums, API endpoints, etc) but there could be another couple of permissions there, one where the API declares itself as an API and thus you grant the Javascript permission to call an API; and another where you can define whether to ignore version changes on any particular domain.
In fact if we are doing a ground up redesign, then it would be possible to separate the textual data content from the formatting and application code in ways that HTML currently makes difficult. So you could still version and checksum the code and still have the page rendered at the server side.
It would also be nice to have some definable CPU and memory caps too - since each tab is basically now a virtual machine.
This is all pie-in-the-sky stuff and probably really badly explained too (it's late and I've never been great at explaining things at the best of times anyway). Plus a lot of it is stuff I've just thought of now as examples to your question. So I'm sure you'd find many faults with what I've posted. Thus all I ask is you respect the spirit of what I'm saying rather than taking the points literally as a written gospel I'm suggesting we implement tomorrow. There will be problems implementing that verbatim but my point is to illustrate just how little protection the web offers and how much further we need to go given its current nature is basically just allowing anyone to run any untrusted application on their local machine.