It's a real pity. Part of the issue is on browsers at the time were competing for developers, not users. So this feature was largely buried in UIs, its treatment was inconsistent, and browsers never bothered to enforce it.

I wonder if they could skip the pop-up if do-not-track is set to "0" (explicit consent).

Unlike do-not-track to 1, as far as I know, it is never set to 0 by default. So it should represent actual consent.

Not the best for privacy, but at least, it would make the web less annoying.

Just a guess, but even people that don't want to be tracked choose the easy "accept everything" button than spending the time to customize the tracking.

If companies DoNotTrack, they will have fewer people opting-in for tracking.

> even people that don't want to be tracked choose the easy "accept everything" button

The design of these consent forms is often so obscure I end up in some menu system with too much information I didn't want, and no hotkeys to go back except leave the website.

Nearly every single cookie pop up I have seen is provided by the exact same third party company. That cookie dialog has an option where you can have a simple "Reject all" button that you can click to reject all "not necessary" cookies and use the website.

It is the website owners fault when they choose not to turn that feature on.

That shouldn't be a "feature" that you can turn on and off; according to the EU regulations, the option must be equally prominent so there should always be a "reject all" button, and it can't be buried or made harder to see than the "accept all" button.

(Leaving aside that sites should just not have these banners, which provides the best user experience. Just delete all the tracking and the banners along with it.)

I usually right click these and choose ublock origin's block element to make it go away. I actually don't know what that means as I never answered the question one way or the other.

Wasn't there an incident where a browser shipped with DoNotTrack enabled by default, and thus the signal didn't actually mean the user explicitly enabled DNT themselves?

That was one of the excuses used by some major websites to justify ignoring the DNT signal, yes.

The argument is transparent self-serving BS, though.