[ethbr0]

Point.

I suppose the formalism around popups, and specifically when the EU decided to start levying fines on entities who used dark patterns to avoid the spirit of "accept/reject must be equally easy to click", convinced me that user-visible was a better way to win the fight.

Granted, it's not a technically optimal solution, but it may be a politically optimal one. Vis-a-vis the people vs the advertising industry.

I'm unconvinced that DNT would have ever garnered the same support as something that people, and specifically politicians, can see. Which would have led to ad money quietly carrying the day.

I'm hopefully after we've chiseled "Thou shalt respect user decisions" in stone deeply enough, we can flip back to enabling a user agent to automatically respond to that question for us.

[PaulHoule]

It does make visible how absurd the situation is. You might imagine an advertising system would require one or two cookies but it's so shocking to see that some ordinary site would have 40 third part cookies. Some of that is the use of these embeds from the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and some of it is the "knives out" situation where nobody trusts anybody in the adtech universe and the answer is to have 10 different authorities collecting information and assume they can't all be colluding with each other. (e.g. everybody has a reason to understate or overstate views or clicks and naturally there is attrition in the pipeline so the numbers won't add up perfectly.)