[ezoe]

The problem is, most people don't understand what cookie really is. If it's understood, you don't need to support so much clueless people and no sane politician in EU would made a cookie law.

The button you suggests cause more harm than good. Because people don't understand the cookie and think "is this button delete unnecessary data from my computer? Why not" and click it. Now all the legitimate data that were saved on their local storage is gone and they complains.

[mgkimsal]

"Now all the legitimate data that were saved on their local storage is gone and they complains."

Not necessarily. Cookie !== localStorage (although... localStorage didn't exist at the time, IIRC).

My point was "we" (it/tech folks, but mainly browser makers) got ourselves in to this mess in the first place, and rather than making things more obvious and easier to deal with at that time, we seemed to double down on more obscure UIs.

I swear, pretty much every Netscape release, and later, for years, every other Firefox release, changed where/what/how cookie mgt was located in their UI.

"most people don't understand what cookie really is"

And that's... whose fault? Putting a big-ass 'COOKIE' button, with transparency in to what data is there, with quick options to remove it all, would have gone a LONG way to normalizing understanding. See some unknown shit in there? Delete it. If enough important things start breaking after deletion, people would have adapted (either users, or developers).

"delete unnecessary data" - there's pretty much nothing people put in cookies that is truly 'necessary' for most folks.

We didn't give people usable tools to manage this stuff, so eventually people turned to legislative means.