“Let privacy browsers ship privacy protections or the signal on by default, and drop any mandatory install-time or session-start ‘set your preference prompt,” wrote three privacy-focused web browsers in a joint statement asking European Union’s Digital Omnibus. This joint statement advocating for users’ choice is issued by Firefox, DuckDuckGo and Vivladi.
They are also asking the EU to allow but never mandating the browser extensions to handle user consent to maximize choice and therefore avoid penalising browsers that protect by design, like the above-mentioned three browsers.
What is Digital Omnibus? It is a regulatory package, published on November 19, 2025 as an initiative to streamline and rationalise EU’s digital laws, as per European Commission’s press release. You can download their Digital Omnibus Regulation Proposal here .
Why they argue site-level consent isn’t real choice? “Consent fatigue is not consent,” states the browsers trio arguing that people are when people are given the choice at site-level, like for tracking cookies, it is ought to irritate and cause fatigue eventually and thus they are advocating for privacy-preserving design at the browser-level itself.
They state that 76% of people are irritated by these pop-ups and 68% don’t want to deal with them at all, while citing a research report whose hyperlink doesn’t seem to be working.
They further argue that their tools are good at blocking the third-party data requests but not the requests from server-side and therefore they say “the only route to decline that is the site’s own consent interface, which is exactly why the exemptions to consent built into the Omnibus should be narrowly framed on genuine low-risk processing.”
What the browsers trio is arguing against is the data processing exemptions under the proposed regulations which allow unconsented processing for “low risk” purposes. They argue that the only user choice that exist to prevent the server-level data collection is the cookie banners and if such data processing is to be allowed then the users will be deprived of the meaningful choice. They further say that standardization is required to strengthen the existing automated tools that can auto-reject cookie requests.
They are also asking the EU to guarantee that any privacy signal standard is developed through open, multi-stakeholder governance with regulators, browsers, civil society, consumer organisations, privacy experts and market participants all as the stakeholders in the discussions. “No single browser vendor, operating system or platform should be able to define unilaterally how privacy signals work,” read their statement.
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