Coming to a website near you this summer: the European Commission is close to a ‘solution’ that could force people to use their government-issued ID to get online. EDRi and EFF’s concerns about threats to everyone’s privacy and data protection, a chilling effect on access to information, and digital exclusion – harming the already most marginalised in society - remain unsolved.
What’s wrong with being able to opt out of cookies? This does not seem comparable at all.
The following:
If companies are indulging in abusive use of cookies (or index DB, local storage, plugins or other things) then ban those abusive use of cookies and fine companies that transgress until they stop. The EU essentially caves to industry pressure and put the burden on the individual visitor, which just allowed the companies to make it very, very annoying to opt out. Have you noticed how ‘allow all’ is always a single click, but allow none isn’t, if the option exists at all? Regardless, those settings? Guess where they’re stored: Cookies. Which means that those of us who were already preventing local storage of data are now having to deal with those lovely “choices” over, and over and over. Every visit to youtube, every newspaper article we try to read.
This was not an improvement in my quality of life. And I doubt the practical efficacy to boot. Can’t track user behavior and Internet usage patterns by way of cookies anymore? Fingerprinting to the rescue.