How browser extensions can query the user's consent state via a standard protocol The problem: privacy tools that can't talk to each other The browser extension ecosystem has ad blockers, cookie managers, fingerprint protectors, and VPN clients. Each makes decisions about user privacy independently. None of them knows what the others are doing, and none of them knows what the user actually wants at the purpose level. If an ad blocker wants to know whether the user has allowed analytics on a given site, there's no way to ask. If a cookie manager wants to check whether the user has denied ads, it has to implement its own consent model. Every privacy extension reinvents the same wheel, and the user has to configure each one separately. A read-only consent API ProtoConsent exposes an inter-extension API that lets other browser extensions query the user's consent state. The protocol uses chrome.runtime.sendMessage with ProtoConsent's extension ID as the target.…