Monday July 27 2026

Hacker Times

Kill The Cookie Banner

Discussion

Stop the tracking circus.

Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner. Unfortunately, the tracking industry is pushing back – and so far, they’ve been successful. We need YOUR help to #KillTheCookieBanner!

Cookie banners are made to trick you into waiving your rights

You may think that EU privacy law requires cookie banners. But the law is clear: online tracking is prohibited by default.

Therefore, the tracking industry needs you to waive your rights. That’s why they invented cookie banners, which often are deliberately misleading as well as annoying.

This results in up to 90% of people saying “YES” – even though only around 3% actually want to be tracked online. This system is broken by design.

The solution: automatically communicate your privacy preference

In Autumn 2025, as part of a bigger legal reform*, the EU Commission finally proposed a solution to the cookie banner problem: automated signals that would communicate your privacy preferences between your device and websites or apps. You could then choose whether you want to accept, refuse, or limit tracking.

This idea is neither new nor complex. Your browser already automatically signals other preferences to websites, for example your preferred language. In some US states, such signals for privacy preferences are already legally supported.

The tracking lobby fights to keep the cookie banner

This would be a simple solution. But the tracking industry seems afraid that if you can express your preferences efficiently, it could result in lower consent rates for tracking.

Following lobbying efforts spearheaded by Google and the tracking industry, several Member States are now blocking the EU Commission’s proposal to get rid of the cookie banner.

But not only that: industry groups are also lobbying the European Parliament to reject the proposal.

We need YOUR help!

That’s where you come in: the fight to kill the cookie banner is far from over. The Member States and the European Parliament have not yet decided on their position on the issue yet.

You can take action by contacting your representative in the European Parliament or in your Member State and express your frustration.

*This proposal for privacy signals is part of an EU law reform called the Digital Omnibus. Most other parts of this reform are problematic and would weaken people’s rights. We want to make clear that we do not support these other aspects of the proposed reform.

tangotaylor•about 4 hours ago

> that solution has already failed.

Yes, granted, a globally enforced whitelist probably wouldn't work. I'm referring to bespoke lists that parents control. I know plenty of parents that use this. e.g. here's Apple's feature:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121#:~:text=Prevent%20ina...

> It works for websites because they can cleanly identify a child and filter content if appropriate.

This still doesn't solve the problem of different jurisdictions and culture wars of what is or isn't appropriate for kids. All this does is move the liability upstream to websites instead of the devices. That is, instead of the browser deciding what's appropriate, now Youtube, Reddit, etc have to decide. And, as we've seen with the OSA in the UK, typically smaller platforms can't handle the enforcement cost so they just shut down entirely.

https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/

The larger platforms often use overbroad CYA measures and throw up age verification where they don't need to (Reddit has done this in the EU), or just ban minors (Anthropic and character.ai did this).

As far as blocking explicit content, a self-labeling requirement like RTA accomplishes the same thing as a "this is a child" header but without the liability CYA and without the privacy concerns.

Where the "this is a child" header solution could theoretically win is allowing kids to access websites in a limited child-safe way, e.g. going to Reddit in child mode automatically shuts off certain subreddits. But, as we've seen, it just doesn't work well in practice and usually frustrates parents by overly broad content policing and liability theater. Kids are also at different levels of maturity and I've seen them get frustrated when they're binned into age categories that they feel they don't deserve. e.g. a 12 year old might be plenty mature enough for the 13-16 age category.

But my real objection to the "this is a child header" is the privacy risk and surveillance risk. I don't think it's worth it.

xp84•8 minutes ago

Let me be clear, I can't stand the social-media industrial complex and the advertising universe. I've seen the bottom that we've raced to, with absolute bullshit popping up everywhere and entire sites full of slop with clickbait "headlines" just rigged to get ad impressions.

And I'd gladly trade today's BS for any version of "The Internet" pre-2007.

But the "Before" Internet wasn't some natural sustainable state.

Before 1997 or so, "the Internet" was being paid for by academic institutions and big companies, and wasn't really all that commercial at all. It was also pretty tiny and blessedly simple. Honestly this version is the most achievable (re-creatable?) today since we can set up indie websites much easier today than we could then. Instead of using your free webspace from your university or employer, 20 of us could share a $5 a month instance, and link to each other's webpages, and add an IRC server to that instance just for fun.

In the 1998-2007 era, the Internet got a lot bigger, but was also still pretty fun and not that enshittified, but that's just because it was being paid for by VC money being burned.

Today we are where we are in terms of business model[1] because Google and Facebook achieved great success with ad-based business models because of the ability to target ads better, and because consumers of The Internet have spoken, loudly, with their closed wallets. They've said "We will only pay for content if it's All The Music and ~$10 a month flat rate, or if it's a big/interesting enough video on-demand service and under $20 a month. We'll never pay for news or text content of any kind." So, the businesses with other types of content do what the public wants them to do: have cost-free content whose access is conditional on being advertised to very annoyingly, or they marginalize themselves with paywalls, subscribed to by only a small minority of users.

[1] i'm setting aside the non-business aspects of our mess, namely the poison that social media, 'engagement' optimization, and ragebait-as-news has wrought on society.