Angela Lang / CNET
If you're tired of websites chasing you and just as frustrated with website popups asking you to sift through obscure browser cookie settings - good news. An alliance of web publishers and browser manufacturers has developed technologies that prevent websites from selling or sharing the information they collect about you.
If the effort is successful, a single setting on your browser can prevent website publishers from selling your information - at least if you live in California. And contrary to a similar effort called the Do Not Track years ago, this one could have legal teeth.
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The Global Privacy Control project, supported by publishers such as the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as browser makers Brave and Mozilla, complies with two current data protection laws. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the former Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe are the reason you struggle with cookie settings on so many websites. These small text files are key to how many websites are tracking your online activity.
A provision of the CCPA allows for a single switch that you can set on your browser via the browser itself or a browser extension that tells each website what you want and removes those dialog boxes. That's what the members of the alliance have built and they are working to make it legally binding under the CCPA so that websites have to take the setting into account.
This is the latest step in years of efforts to balance privacy with the convenience of free, ad-supported websites. Advertisers got the upper hand with an earlier, voluntary action called "Don't Track" that hissed.
But the tone of the discussion is different now: the protection of privacy is on the rise. Issues like Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal have raised consumer awareness of privacy. Browser manufacturers like Safari, Brave, and Firefox have made privacy a priority and often intervene on behalf of users no matter what websites try. And regulators are becoming more active.
Other partners of Global Privacy Control are the search engine DuckDuckGo, Tumblr and the WordPress publisher Automattic as well as the advocate of the online rights Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
The organizations are working to formalize the technology as an industry standard, also known as global data protection control.
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