Interestingly, I’ve noticed that some users find this suspicious because there is no cookie banner... People may have become so used to seeing them that a site without one can look dubious or unprofessional. And some maintainers probably include them just to conform with common practice, or due to legal uncertainty.
So I’m wondering whether a simple, community-driven, public declaration could help. Something like a "No-Tracking Web Declaration". It could be a short document describing fair practices that websites could reference, for example:
- only first-party session cookies - server logs used only for operational purposes - etc.
A website could then display a small statement such as "This site follows the No-Tracking Web Declaration v1.0". This might help legitimate the approach, and give visitors and operators confidence that avoiding a cookie banner is actually compliant with applicable regulations.
I’m curious what the HN community thinks:
- Would something like this actually be useful? - Does anything similar already exist that I might have missed?
And I’d love feedback from developers or maintainers who actually run minimal or privacy-respecting websites.