EU Member States (and Google) suddenly want to keep cookie banners

Supporting noyb.eu since years for their great work.

> Using completely far-fetched figures, it argues that without cookie banners, all online advertising would come to a standstill.

If only. Unfortunately even without any tracking at all they could still bombard you with their psychological warfare machine.

Cookies are not the meta for tracking anymore. Fingerprinting [1] is highly effective across IPs and across incognito/browser profiles. Content blockers like Brave shields or uBlock Origin do not stop fingerprinting.

The only browsers I've found that defeat it on desktop are Mullvad and Tor Browser as well as all the antidetect browsers I've tried.

Disturbingly, fingerprint.com is not defeated by Tor browser on Android. We know fingerprinting is more effective on Mobile, and the recommendations say to use desktop for the most anonymity, so this isn't surprising.

You still aren't completely de-anonymized if you are tracked across browser sessions and websites because that doesn't link back to your real identity, but it's damn easier because all it takes is one mistake and all that activity is tied to your identity. It would also allow an adversary to target you specifically with an exploit, but obviously this is not in most peoples threat model.

Mullvad [2] and Tor browser are blocked from using or signing up for most websites because of IP reputation and the browser fingerprinting protections which make them look like VMs and bots. Unlike the antidetect browsers, they don't spend extensive resources on site compatibility and avoiding detection, which leaves most sites shaking you down for suspect fraud. Annoying, when the real fraudsters are passing through easily with anti detect browsers and residential IPs.

Antidetect browsers are used by marketers, web scrapers, social media account managers, ecom, among other low lifes. These use different browser profiles to avoid fingerprinting by isolating and randomizimg identifiers while constantly patching(use a few week old version and you'll see it gets detected as something to be blocked, not detected as in correlated cross profile, just blocked) to avoid detection.

I'd like to see a privacy focused antidetect browser, but perhaps open source makes it easier for the fingerprinters to find detections.

Brave shields blocks cookie popups by default, so I'd recommend Brave browser to everyone who's annoyed by them. I assume uBlock has a list that does this as well. I remember reading recently that the vast majority of websites don't even abide by the cookie popups, and content blocks like Brave Shields or uBlock Origin block the cookies anyway.

[1] https://fingerprint.com

[2] Essentially Tor Browser without the Tor network built in for better usability on the web. Because VPN IPs have better reputation than Tor exit nodes.

Can be used with any VPN, but most users will use Mullvad VPN giving a larger crowd. Mullvad has a browser extension which, when connected to Mullvad VPN on your computer, allows you to choose what ever server/IP you'd like and also offers a randomized per website and session option.

Mullvad and Tor are always incognito mode so tabs and logins are lost on close. Mullvad is working on a persistent mode, so I'm looking forward to that usability improvement.

The origin story of the "EU" cookie banner:

  1. Proposal: Lets ban tracking.
  2. "But what if the user wants to be tracked? People want better adds![1] We are also missing out on business innovations!"
  3. Fine. But since nobody in their right mind would want to done to them, you must prove with out a shadow of a doubt that the people you are tracking did consent to that.
  4. Surely, nobody will do this.
  5. Cookie banners everywhere.

[1] I am not kidding. "Isnt it better if the ads show things you are interested in?" was a main talking point.

Bonus: The original proposal (~2017) also mandated that social media which uses personal algorithmic feeds must make the individual data set of each user which is used to generated said feed viewable and editable to the user. Was ofc shut down by the corporate bootlickers people tend to vote into our parliaments.

I think this shows how much we need better democratic institutions like a full functioning parliament and (in my view) direct democracy on EU level.

If the councils make stupid ideas, citizen could start an initiative or at least the MEP can annoy the commission.

Wouldn't the likely effects of this be to:

1. Push even more of the internet within walled gardens like Meta and YouTube, where they don't have to rely on 3rd party cookies in order to show relevant ads

2. Push more of the web, including journalism, behind paywalls

3. Cause a lot of the existing free (ad supported) web to be taken down

4. For existing free/ad-supported sites, an even larger quantity of ads per page/time would be needed to continue running?

?