Re:Fingerprints Are the New Cookies
by darkwi11ow on Monday October 12, 2026 @07:16AM
(#50054688)
Well DNT indeed did not made it, but there is global privacy control
header that is nowadays required as explicit opt-out mechanism by CCPA
and some other states legislation. I always implement support for GPC in my products.
Re:Fingerprints Are the New Cookies
by stingraycharles on Monday October 12, 2026 @07:31AM
(#50054824)
Never seen this offered to be set by any browsers, though.
Firefox offers it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control
They don't seem to call it GPC, but their "ask websites not to track" feature now uses it instead of GPC.
Re:Fingerprints Are the New Cookies
by stingraycharles on Monday October 12, 2026 @08:56AM
(#50055770)
Yes ok, and Firefox was also the only browser that offered DNT, which is why it pretty much died.
It's the complete opposite. What killed DNT is Microsoft adding it to their browser and set it to true by default, pretending they cared about their users. Doing so, it was not the expression of the users anymore and so web developers ignored it, and so it died.
Sorry, that does seem like a reasonable default. This is the fault of web developers to not respect it, not Microsoft. Nice cope.
Re:Fingerprints Are the New Cookies
by stingraycharles on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @12:10AM
(#50066581)
I think you’re missing the point that this caused a backlash from the ad industry / publishers that suddenly stopped recognizing these headers, otherwise it would impact their bottom line too much. Obviously it’s a good default from a user’s perspective.
It died because companies had no incentive to respect it. The writers of the GDPR could have easily added a single line saying you had to respect the DNT header, but they chose not to.
Re:Fingerprints Are the New Cookies
by hiccuphippo on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:25AM
(#50057809)
I wonder how many websites use that header as part of their fingerprint mechanism.
Re:Fingerprints Are the New Cookies
by darkwi11ow on Monday October 12, 2026 @08:07AM
(#50055187)
It's set on by default in "privacy browsers" like Brave or Zen, but off by default
in most mainstream ones -- user needs to set it on explicitly via about:config
There is also https://killthecookiebanner.eu/
if you write to your reps, they might just change that. The Eu is one of the few democracies left. Slow but powered by the people
I dunno man, from an outsider's perspective I used to think that but it seems to slowly be getting worse with trying to shove through internet surveillance and corporate protectionism under the guise of "protect the kids". I guess sadly someone saw how unreasonably effective that can be in the US.
Well the Chatcontrol thing was a really close call. and they only got through with it because they did a third vote on the law when everyone was relaxed about it being rejected twice.
But yeah, scaring the people back in line is always a tactic thats used
Better to just harass them into a habit of dismissing the banner.