Maybe Alexander is right… but then there is the question of by what right he can tell a destination website that they must not deploy (e.g.) Meta or Google tracking pixels.

Or that – passim his not being able to achieve that – how the likes of Google or Meta could ever explicitly honour not tracking him in specific (rather than in general) without incidentally assigning to him something that he would call an identity? Viz: a cookie that says we don’t know who this person is so don’t bother.

Reading between the lines this appears to be an attempt to resurrect by police and privacy regulation the extremely dead horse of advisory Do Not Track (DNT) flags – a crock addressing an issue better solved by users choosing/demanding that browsers adopt more restrictive cookie and identity management – e.g. as TorBrowser does by default.

Also I find it astonishing that somebody who expects DNT to be honoured by platforms somehow won’t trust the same platforms to manage cookies under the terms of GDPR.

(Later Edit: …not to mention all of the non-cookie-based, server-to-server, back-end-based forms of advertising tracking which some pure-play advertising companies engage in, totally being ignored in the discussion. As anti-tracking, anti-advertising activism goes, this article is straight out of 2015.)

But maybe this is not actually about privacy at all.

Maybe this is actually about being a super privacy activist, instead?

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/11/meta_youtube_criminal_charges/