This is sad and yet another step backwards for Firefox. Yes, not many websites honored it, but some did and automatically set cookie preferences accordingly. There should’ve been more lobbying for this to become legally binding within the EU instead.
It was like wearing a technicolor badge with flashers that said “don’t look at me” while playing the sound from Inception.
It made you more trackable because the entire ad industry ignored it. While there were a true, TRUE handful of sites that respected it, those are never the sites usually it was meant to deal with.
It was a double-edged sword. While websites could honor it, it could also be abused as another data point for fingerprinting.
Legalism mentality is cringe, we need solutions that work against criminals who don’t care. When people push for legalist solutions it shows they have no real understanding of how the world actually works and just want to complain about what people should and shouldn’t do.
Shoulds are irrelevant in this world, people do what they want, even if it is illegal, in the digital world where there are way less clues left behind of illegal activity we need solutions that actually do something, like actually blocking those trackers, or feeding false fingerprint data that changes everytime or is exactly the same as other browsers. Not expecting the providers to follow the law, they believe they are above the law until they get caught, then they’ll act apologetic and start doing it again.
Your assumption is based on the idea that these people are not criminals, which is wrong.
How are you going to prove that this particular metric was used to fingerprint? That’s the issue I have - you can identify cookies, pixel trackers etc but there’s no way to prove whether a site uses a flag you send anyways. And enforcing something that can’t be proven is really hard - currently, not only the easy rules are enforced.
Presumably it’s easier to lobby for something that’s already legally enforced elsewhere. And sometimes lobbying is just unsuccessful.
With a reasonable alternative available, removing the additional fingerprinting vector seems like the best idea to avoid tracking. The few good actors can look at the Global Privacy Control instead, so there’s literally no downside here.
