That's a good nuclear option, but often we don't actually want to block all cookies. What we want is for sites to use cookies in ways that benefit us, but not use cookies to track us. Blocking them all or selectively allowing specifically chosen cookies puts to onus on the visitor to guess which cookies do what or lose functionality. Making the website owner legally responsible for declaring which cookies are for tracking and which provide functionality is a boon.

The person you replied to did not say block all cookies. They specifically said block all 3rd party cookies. If a site wants to set a 1st party cookie, but through code on their end share that cookie data with 3rd party sites, there's nothing we can do about that. But by gawd we can absolutely block the ones that are too lazy to do it like that and just link someone else's codes.

No banners necessary. Just block 3rd parties.

Third party cookies aren't the only thing that's tracking you. You can be tracked by first party cookies, local storage, your IP address, browser fingerprinting and other techniques. GDPR requires websites to get your explicit consent for any kind of tracking.

A lot of users are already blocking third party cookies and that's the default in Safari and Chrome nowadays - but ad companies have moved on.

I don't get it. A public site is like a public store. Do you have the expectation of privacy in a store? No not really. And be sure stores do track you.

Some of us think a browser acts as a User Agent. It's supposed to be on our side, not the side of the website.

(Under your analogy maybe the store is putting a beacon in my pocket.)

In this case the agent would be well a literal agent. Nobody is requiring your agent to walk around and advertise who you are, to accept every cookie or display an advert on its shirt while walking around the store for you

GPDR also applies to physical stores, not just the internet.

I have the expectation that when I enter a store that the store keeper doesn't sic his minions to sniff after me while I browse other stores and for good measure maybe peeks into my bedroom.

Physical stores don't do that and therefore your analogy breaks down.

They do put electronic advertising screens in front that collect "anonymous" mac addresses. They also put trackers inside the shopping carts to follow you inside the store. The client-card you use during checkout records your name, address and spending habits.

They don't need to sic a minion to sniff after you. The implication of buying condoms and then visiting the hotel only requires to correlate three tables.

Those advertising screens aren't necessarily compliant with the GDPR.

https://techgdpr.com/blog/wifi-tracking-retail-analytics-gdp... has some background.

https://www.spring-board.info/differences-between-geo-wifi-f... is from a British company which claims to do compliant tracking in shopping centres etc.

> The client-card you use during checkout records your name, address and spending habits.

There's a very good reason why I don't have any such client card and will never apply for one.

The store can track your purchases down to the line item if you use one of those. I vehemently disagree with that.

Also, I pay mostly with cash.

For your analogy to be more accurate, any store I walk into would have the ability to look at my behavior in every store, essentially in perpetuity, and share/sell that information. Feels like something you should at least have to opt into.

Yes that how Visa and other companies make boatloads of cash selling your data

Visa only tracks purchases. Surveillance ad tech can track literally everything your browser is doing. Did you go to Reddit today, what subreddit, what posts, who did you reply to, etc. Or, did you visit a porn site today, or a dissident political site, or a marketplace for abortion drugs that are illegal in your state. There is no meatspace analog; the comparison is absurd.

Visa tracks did you purchase porn, did you buy something from Infowars.com, did you buy abortion pills, etc. That's only one source for data that advertisers use in the physical world. You think that's a big difference?

Yeah I think there's a huge difference between what I buy with a credit card and what I look at on the internet.

> Do you have the expectation of privacy in a store?

Yes, absolutely. I don't have an expectation of having as much privacy as I do when in a private residence with the blinds closed, but I do have an expectation of some forms of privacy.

* The store will not perform a full strip-search of my person upon entering.

* The store will not place a GPS tracker on me as I leave, to determine where I live.

* The store will not have a team of employees with clipboards follow me at all times, making notes of my location within the store.

* The store will not keep a record of my eye movements, correlated against which products are being glanced at.

The problem is that, as technology has advanced, some forms of privacy that used to be protected by impracticality of implementation no longer have that protection. For example:

* The store will keep video record of my visit for a few weeks at the most.

* The store will not analyze video records outside of suspected shoplifting.

* Record of previous purchases is limited to the cashier's memory.

Privacy is not a binary yes/no decision. As technology improves, forms of privacy that were previously protected by limitations of implementation must be protected through other means.

Cookies aren't the only thing involved here. The banners are asking if they can track you and that includes lots of things, your IP is the most obvious.

Third party cookies are already blocked in safari and Firefox. Cookie prompt is for first party cookie like analytics, ab testing, and rum cookies.

Watch out what you're agreeing to. Sites can share your email and telephone number with data brokers, if you've provided this info and clicked "agree".

You're agreeing to all — otherwise illegal — tracking they can manage to do, not just some cookies.

Unlike Safari, Firefox doesn’t block all third party cookies by default (because that breaks some websites’ legitimate use cases). Firefox does block known tracking cookies (with its “Enhanced Tracking Protection” Block list) and the remaining cookies are sandboxed to each website (“Total Cookie Protection”), so the Google tracking cookies on foo.com don’t know about the Google tracking cookies on bar.com.

Yeah I'm a bit confused, what option for blanket accepting all cookies are they talking about here? The only one I know is the one that browsers provide, for which the obvious counterpart is to reject all cookies.

If I'm honest I never could quite understand the whole privacy kerfuffle about cookies, they ask the user to remember some token and if they so choose send that token back when they visit again. If cookies are a breach of privacy then so are ticket numbers.

Of course the whole issue is that the most popular user agents (i.e. web browsers) did very little to empower users to act responsibly with their cookies. I mean I consider the Cookie Autodelete extension just basic hygiene at this point, just like having a good ad blocker and some kind of firewall/virus scanner.