Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Europe’s cookie law messed up the internet. Brussels wants to fix it. (www.politico.eu)

submitted 3 weeks ago by Zerush@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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The European Commission aims to reform the EU's cookie consent rules that have cluttered websites with intrusive banners asking for permission to track user data[^4]. The initiative seeks to streamline data protection while maintaining privacy safeguards through centralized consent mechanisms[^4].

Cookie consent banners emerged from the ePrivacy Directive (Cookie Law) and GDPR requirements, which mandate websites obtain explicit user permission before collecting non-essential data through cookies[^17]. Current rules have led to widespread implementation of pop-up notices that interrupt user experience and often employ confusing interfaces.

The proposed changes reflect growing recognition that the existing approach has "messed up the internet" while failing to provide meaningful privacy protection[^4]. Rather than requiring individual consent on every website, the Commission is exploring solutions like centralized consent management to reduce banner fatigue while preserving user privacy rights.

[^4]: Ground News - Europe's cookie law messed up the internet. Brussels wants to fix it.

[^17]: Transcend - Cookie Consent Banner Best Practices: Optimizing Your Consent Management Experience

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[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

"Essential" is still very vague. All purposes should be categorized. If used for session/identity, then it should be categorized as "session/identity", there should not be a category defined as "essential".

You can also make a karaoke page that does not work without access to the microphone, but still the browser has a dedicated permission request for this, it does not get mixed up into a bucket of generic "essential" permissions only because that page doesn't work without using the microphone.

There should be a whole HTML standard similar to the Notification.requestPermission() (which requests permission to send browser notifications), but with a granular set of permissions for storage of data for different purposes.

And this should be a browser standard, not a custom popup in the logic of the website itself that will be styled differently on each page, allowing all sort of anti-patterns. I should be able to control, from the browser, what the defaults should be for each individual category of data, without having to click through every single website I visit individually. The UI to request for consent should be controlled by the browser, not by the page.