Expecting another smash success like the Do Not Track header.

If you could sue people for real money when they violate said header it might be taken more seriously pretty quickly.

I don't believe that you can sue under the GDPR. I've always understood it to be something that you can lodge a complaint against someone with your local authorities. No idea about the CCPA but I wouldn't be surprised if you could considering how lawsuit-happy Americans are.

> I don't believe that you can sue under the GDPR.

I don't believe that either, I just think that flags like these can only be taken seriously if all actors have maximum incentive to take these seriously.

Do Not Track didn't work because (1) it was not enforced at the browser level, (2) it had no legal backing and (3) it was not granular enough to be useful. With GDPR, CCPA etc. in place the online privacy landscape is very different, and a new standard is very much possible today. Why did every site in the world implement all the consent popups in the first place when they could have continued to do nothing?

Do not track is a gentleman's agreement in a world of thugs. But you could block cookies at the browser level if the user clicks No.

Everyone's talking about DNT, but P3P from Microsoft circa 2002 is probably more instructive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

Privacy is nuanced. It's' really hard to encode all ways you may or may not want your data used into a few boolean questions.

One of my favourite Stack Overflow answers still is making your privacy policy a potato.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/16475093

I definitely spent time in like 2004 trying to understand what to put in the field to make my SSO work in IE until I found out everyone just lied.

They did. It was called Do-Not-Track and Microsoft had the bright idea to pull an iOS 14 and turn it on by default in IE. At that point the few ad companies that had supported it basically told the browser vendors to pound sand and it became entirely useless for anything but fingerprinting.

Do not track should have been on by default. But the idea that anyone would ever obey it without the legal force was always a fantasy. If 90% of people checked "do not track" do you think they would have started to follow it? Of course not. They would just have some other reason.

The problem is that sites will just pretend that any such standard doesn't actually exist. All of these sites could suppress cookie popups for clients that send a do-not-track header, but choose not to.

The problem is that I can't possible imagine Google implementing this, as it would hurt their data hoarding

Why? The browser has access to it at all times, and you can still ask for it anywhere. So Google (via Chrome) isn't losing anything.

In fact, everyone else (including Google via analytics) is probably get more data; make it so that in the same way the browser form fills address and phone number and things automatically based on past fills, have a standard API in the browser to handle that. Now users just have to click "okay" to share all that data, rather than enter it in.

Well seeing as a lot of sites use dark patterns to confuse users into accepting more liberal tracking, I'm not sure I would agree that this would lead to more data collected

It may surprise you, but Google was not the villain here:

https://www.cnet.com/news/apache-web-software-overrides-ie10...