^This, let the user choose. If you can run Debian you can change your default search engine.

This is only useful for people who know what a search engine is. (Seriously, many people equate "googling" = "search engine", and don't know there is a general category of this thing). Unless there are two big bold buttons on start-up--one that says "Use Google for Search" and the other that says "Use Duck Duck Go for Search"--it would appear broken to them. Even then, almost everyone would pick "Google" just for name brand recognition.

i would argue most people that install chromium, not chrome, no what a search engine is. unfortunately, since chromium lost google account login capabilities, i do not install chromium anymore. now i just think "search engine" means "google".

I would argue that even though most people can e.g. walk up stairs or fill in a form or change their browser settings, you should often provide e.g. wheelchair ramps or helpers or sensible defaults for the ones who can't.

Installing chrome on debian is certainly harder than installing chromium.

And you are assuming there is only 1 user in the machine. Which is not the case for people who have kids.

Exactly. We're on the third age of the internet so to speak. At the first only the computer nerds were on it (up to ~2000); then only computer nerds + mostly young adults were on it (up to ~2010); and now all the literal toddlers and literal elderly and everyolne else is on it.

Perhaps a ballot on first run, much like browsers should be in a well regulated market.

My favorite thing is when a government "solves" a market problem by incentivizing forcing a user to choose when most don't care

It worked great for cookies in the EU. Really improved my browsing experience.

You prefer the alternative, whomever owns the platform wins?

There is a spectrum between everyone votes on everything and yielding everything to our corporate overlords. For example there could be an "I don't care" button which picks one at random.

Cookie banners despite their annoyance are educating people and motivating corps to minimize their PII usage.

In terms of human hours used, it's possibly one of the more expensive education programs ever mandated by a government. And I haven't seen any evidence that it's actually moving corps to minimize their PII usage, since they don't pay the cost in time of having to read the banners.

Seems like it's either covert surveillance (before the EU cookie thing), or manipulated consent surveillance.

I personally improved my browsing experience with the Consent-o-matic addon, which knows some of these cookie modals, and fills them for me according to my preset (which is to deny all cookies).

Also, people not caring should not be a baseline. People are ignorant about the vast majority of things going on, and yet they are much better off if those are taken care of by people who actually give a damn - as evidenced by a good deal of regulations that keep lead out of paint, antibiotics out of chicken, and so on.

> People are ignorant about the vast majority of things going on, and yet they are much better off if those are taken care of by people who actually give a damn

No disagreement there, I just think the GDPR rules that led to ubiquitous cookie consent dialogs were indicative of policymaking by people who didn't fit that category. It should have been easy to predict this outcome from that policy.