> As should have been predictable by intelligent legislators, which the EU generally are.

this is certainaly debatable

in every subject I'm a... subject matter expert in: it's been pretty bad

This is a fair point. I suppose I just meant relative to most legislators. It's a very, very low bar - which is partly understandable, given their explicit job is to be the ultimate judge of a vast range of things in none of which they are experts.

Websites could do a better job and if browser makers would get involved to standardize the popup for Accept All/RejectAll/Manage Cookies then you could have a perfect experience.

Today I hit for the first time a site that made it as easy to Accept or Reject startrek.com also many sites now offer option to delete my account and even JS APIs for tracking now have options for GDPR to not store private data. So YES things improved but are not perfect, to blame is not the law but the jerks.

As mentioned in a sister thread, europa.eu uses the browser's DNT header (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/DN...) to see if they should bother asking for tracking.

Browser vendors tried to establish such a standard but it pretty much died when Microsoft enabled it by default for IE9 and some ad brokers began to claim that they can now ignore DNT because it doesn't actually reflect user intent anymore. (see https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/03/microsoft_reverses_ie...)

With that it became deprecated. Thank you, Microsoft and Yahoo.

You still find people here on HN that want to be tracked, they are convinced that tracking is necessary. So a browser could implement something to shut this people up, Instead of a simple flag On or off, you can start with 3 states, On, Off, Unset and you can have it set per webpage.

The DNT spec offers these three states. It also doesn't say anything about it being global, so a browser UI could have a default + overrides.

The general sentiment seems to be that "if you want it, you want it, and who would want it explictly off?"