I always thought it was a stupid idea to try and ask companies not to track you, instead of, you know, blocking trackers without telling them.
It really does seem like the advertising equivalent of BP’s “carbon footprint”, because the company doesn’t like the alternative. In this case the alternative is blocking all ads and trackers for maximum user privacy. The commercial interests of modern web services and advertising services don’t align with the values of privacy conscious users. So instead of pushing for things to try and make the advertisers feel more comfortable, make the users feel comfortable and encourage them to block that crap, and poison their fingerprinting data. These things benefit user privacy so much more than asking not to be tracked politely, and advertisers don’t like them because they can’t just choose not to listen or track the amount of users who don’t want to be tracked.
Makes sense. It was an idealistic idea that was never going to work because it would rely on advertisers honoring a consumer’s request.
Unfortunate, but understandable :(
I wish we could rely on good faith with something like this, but it seems the only way is to block as much tracking as possible by force.
The Global Privacy Control toggle is legally enforceable and is actually followed by sites when enabled. I often get a toast from the site that confirms this, and it may even auto select the most private option in the cookie banner.
Without the force of law, this was never going to work.
Perhaps if the EU had used the presence of absence of the Do Not Track header as their method of determining cookie consent, it could have ended up being useful both from a privacy standpoint and to have saved us from the scourge of annoying as fuck cookie banners they ended up causing. Ah well.
