A better option would be to just make tracking illegal, and heavily fine companies that are found to be doing it. And make it strict liability, so intent doesn't matter.

I can dream...

I know we all have our pitchforks out, and I hate tracking as much as everyone else here, but "tracking" is a very broad term, and is not always malicious. Unless you want to outlaw access logs, for example.

This sounds like a recipe to reduce the internet to a handful of heavily-financed publishers who can afford legal protection against strict liability.

> A better option would be to just make tracking illegal, and heavily fine companies that are found to be doing it. And make it strict liability, so intent doesn't matter.

I don't think it's that easy though. The "just" is doing a lot of work in there. Consider:

Some websites have login with third-party credentials. It doesn't matter that you choose to use these for convenience, because intent doesn't matter, and it is a fact that both the Service Provider and the Identity Provider are tracking you. IdP knows which sites you are logging in to, and SP knows and stores your third-party identity (they might say they need it to know which account you're logging in to, but like I said, intent doesn't matter).

Hacker News is currently tracking me. They might say the cookie is needed for session stuff to work, but intent doesn't matter, and it is a fact that the cookie uniquely identifies me.

My web browser is tracking my mouse position. Mozilla might say they need it for styling stuff to work, but intent doesn't matter, and it is a fact that Mozilla's software is tracking my mouse position in real time (let's not even talk about browser history).

Your browser cache might have two HN posts where my comments appear. If that's the case, then it would be a fact that you are tracking which posts I am commenting on. Intent doesn't matter, so hopefully you're not a company (tracking is fine if you're an individual though (based on the quoted text)).

/s

Hopefully this ride down the slippery slope illustrates some subtleties, at least without a very precise definition of "tracking". But then again, if the definition is too precise, there's gonna be loopholes in the letter of the law; in that case we might say that we should also consider the spirit of the law, but "intent" is part of that.