In Finland, the law implementing the GDPR used to be interpreted so that browser settings were enough to opt out of cookies and you just had to inform the user about what cookies you were setting. This interpretation was suggested by Traficom (the government office in charge of traffic and telecommunications). Some individual complained to the Helsinki Administrative Court, which issued rulings (H1515/2021 and H1516/2021) stating that this interpretation is incorrect - as far as I understand, this is because browser settings cannot differentiate between necessary and optional cookies. The new Traficom advice requires the same annoying pop-ups as everywhere else in the EU.
But I agree it shouldn't technically be too hard to standardize the settings so that your browser could communicate to each site what the user consents to. The hard part is enforcing compliance - we already had Do Not Track, which had very little effect.
But I agree it shouldn't technically be too hard to standardize the settings so that your browser could communicate to each site what the user consents to. The hard part is enforcing compliance - we already had Do Not Track, which had very little effect.