It's not hard to make privacy work when you are the government rather than working against a hostile one.
When prompted by the browser on first login/signup, yes, the same way the password manager works. With stored passwords, keeping the login cookie doesn't even add much value.
Well, there is a skip button. It's labelled "accept all"
Every time you get a cookie banner with options, the website wants to know more about you than the law permits by default.
It’s baffling we’re having this misunderstanding on this site in 2026 still.
Browser fingerprinting / Panopticlick: <https://ssd.eff.org/module/what-fingerprinting> <https://panopticlick.org/>
On-device identifiers --- Google AdID (GAID), Apple IDFA, etc.: <https://developer.transmitsecurity.com/guides/risk/secure_de...> <https://geraguard.com/blog/how-device-fingerprinting-works-m...> <https://alejandrocordon.com/blog/2025/01/18/unique-identifie...>.
And BYW, browser headers can even be a violation if it's determined that you are using them for tracking users in a way that violates ePrivacy demands.
It's still a cookies thing.
So instead everyone stays on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter, which ALSO operate on ads and have far more information on their users than any third-party ad tracker could ever have.
None of this has gotten rid of the privacy problems. It just consolidated them into the worst offenders while jeopardizing the plurality of the web. Now instead of people being tracked by Facebook on a website with a third-party cookie in a like button, they are tracked by Facebook on Facebook in a Facebook page because they never leave Facebook.
The cookie banner isn't about the usage of cookies, it's about _the underlying tracking_. You're allowed to "just" use cookies for normal shit! You can make a website where you use cookies to store login state for a user, without a single banner.
The thing is that every company in the world feels the need to add 1000 tracking cookies to anonymous users to track them through conversion funnels (on top of the ad stuff). That's what you have to inform people about
You can use cookies normally without a banner! You can't track without consent! Every cookie banner is actually a "we want to track you" banner. Calling it a cookie banner is playing into the confusion about what those banners actually are meant to communicate
Browsers already had settings for deleting cookies. There was never a reason for banners whose only function was pulling the ladder up from smaller competitors and concentrating power in the hands of an oligopoly that could siphon data directly from the OS.
This coupled with a law mandating ISPs provide a "change IP on demand" feature would have given users a sort of "Tor light" level of privacy. Strong privacy is trivial to achieve for a government that doesn't have a conflicting goal of total surveillance.