According to the GDPR, every (EU) website MUST have a Cookie Consent if a website places Cookies that are either:
- Analytical or Tracking cookies or;
- Second- or Third party cookies.
Therefore, every website (using some form of Analytics, Ads or Retargeting) has a popup asking the same thing: "Functional, Analytical or Tracking?". This results in two major problems:
- Casually surfing (especially on mobile) becomes the most annoying experience;
- People just click "ok" and (understandably) don't even look at the Consents anymore, which voids the purpose of the consents altogether.
I think it would help if there would be a standard where users could set their preference more globally: For example in the browser.
Something like a browser setting like "Auto-Consent to the following Cookies:" followed by a dropdown: ["Ask every time (default)", "Functional only", "Functional & Analytical", "Functional, Analytical & Tracking"].
I think Mozilla could play a huge role in this, since they could provide the browser setting AND the required JavaScript-API for Cookie-consent integrations and Externally loaded JS to react accordingly.
Something like:
if ('AutoCookieConsent' in navigator) {
navigator.AutoCookieConsent.getPreference()
.then((pref) => {
window.cookieconsent.destroy();
'analytical' in pref && loadGoogleAnalytics();
'tracking' in pref && loadFacebookPixel();
})
.catch((error) => {
window.cookieconsent.show();
});
} else {
window.cookieconsent.show();
}
In the example above, "pref" would be an Array or something to check what the user chose. Empty Array or Reject (catch) implies "Ask every time". Otherwise Array always has "functional" and optionally "analytical" and or "tracking" (or "f", "a", "t", because lol).
Therefore, I wonder: Would this kind of standard be a good idea or are there concerns I don't see? Does such a standard already exist, if so where can I find it? And if such a standard does not exist, where would one put such an proposal? Or would it be best to try an commit a pull request into the Firefox repo?