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Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies

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Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies

#91

Post by ziofill »

coldpie wrote: post #65
berkes wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But "these websites" will then be prosecuted, their owners cannot enter the EU ever again without the risk of severe penalties, they cannot do business in the EU and can and often will, lose access to many services that do want to stay on the good side the EU (i.e. will see their google ads blocked, their stripe frozen, their hosting closed etc) Edit: what I'm trying to say is: this "technical" problem has a rea…

Yeah but the question is how you, as a user, should best protect yourself. I'm saying clicking the "No" provides no advantage over using a browser that just protects you from tracking by default. Then it doesn't matter whether the website is following the law or whether the EU (where I don't live) will enforce the law or change it in the future or whatever. > Now, that won't work for all and everything, it never does…

> So if I have to protect myself from those websites anyway, I may as well apply the same protections to all websites.

And what is the protection?

Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies

#92

Post by jorvi »

raverbashing wrote: post #47
coldpie wrote: post #8

uBlock Origin already has this. Enable the "Cookie notices" and "Annoyances" filters in uBlock Origin's settings. Bonus pro-tip: Firefox for Android supports uBlock Origin, which means you can get rid of these godawful banners on mobile, too. Only iOS users are stuck having to put up with them.

My ideal solution to this would be: accept all cookies, then delete them after page unload

This is what Brave's "Forgetful Browsing" does. There's even a slight delay, in case you accidentally closed the tab.

You can configure the "Cookie Autodelete" extension to behave in a similar way.

Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies

#93

Post by coldpie »

ziofill wrote: post #91
coldpie wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but the question is how you, as a user, should best protect yourself. I'm saying clicking the "No" provides no advantage over using a browser that just protects you from tracking by default. Then it doesn't matter whether the website is following the law or whether the EU (where I don't live) will enforce the law or change it in the future or whatever. > Now, that won't work for all and everything, it never does…

> So if I have to protect myself from those websites anyway, I may as well apply the same protections to all websites. And what is the protection?

I posted links up thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43832541

Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies

#94

Post by jmholla »

rendaw wrote: post #90
tenthirtyam wrote: post #81

Have you seen consent-o-matic? https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

I tried consent-o-matic. Aside from the name making it sound like it says ok to all forms of tracking, it broke a few websites for me and failed to get rid of the banners on many others, and I quickly had to turn it off. TBH I'm not sure how it could be expected to work either, unless all websites use the same consent banner solution.

It by default only accepts essential cookies. I too thought the same thing based on the name of the extension.

Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies

#95

Post by lukasgraf »

hammock wrote: post #13
coldpie wrote: post #8

uBlock Origin already has this. Enable the "Cookie notices" and "Annoyances" filters in uBlock Origin's settings. Bonus pro-tip: Firefox for Android supports uBlock Origin, which means you can get rid of these godawful banners on mobile, too. Only iOS users are stuck having to put up with them.

How do I keep chrome from uninstalling ublock these days every time I restart?

Install it using an enterprise profile and enable the ExtensionManifestV2Availability flag: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43340358

Still works for me to this day, but this option might get axed come June 2025.

Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies

#96

Post by sceptic123 »

berkes wrote: post #66
coldpie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tracking from good companies Say what?

There's proper and good tracking possible just fine. Tracking to discover latency, errors, weird behaviour, malicious actors and so on. Tracking to see what content does well and what not. Tracking to see what rough demographics (mobile, desktop, country, region, time-of-day etc) visit your premises. E.g. plausible-analytics or even Matomo do a good job at i) keeping the data rough and broad and without any PII, and…

If it's not tracking the user then I don't understand what the problem is with DNT here

Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies

#97

Post by moebrowne »

jsheard wrote: post #29
moebrowne wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiding the popup is not the same as clicking reject. It should be but it's not.

Yeah I find that list is more trouble than it's worth, because some sites will block interaction until you dismiss the cookie notice, so you get softlocked if the notice is hidden. I assume that's why uBO disables that list by default.

Agreed. YouTube is a notable example of this, at least in the EU.

Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies

#98

Post by orangecat »

berkes wrote: post #60
charcircuit wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is with how browsers implemented it. Instead of implementing it with a per domain granularity it was implemented as a global option. People may enable the option to block tracking from malicous parties, but may unknowingly block tracking from good companies. So now good companies would need to ask the user if they actually want tracking since they may accidently be blocking it.

No, the real problem was that it worked too good from the perspective of ad-tech and data-gatherers.¹ It relied on the goodwill of those who run these services to i) invest some effort and money to detect the DNT headers and then ii) not collect/store the data of these requests. Back, when only a tiny portion of web-users would send these headers along, the industry was fine to implement it. If only for marketing pur…

the GDPR refrained -rightfully so, IMO- from any implementation details

I would disagree with this. If you're going to force bad actors to take actions that they don't want to, and you give them wide latitude to decide how to comply, then of course they're going to try to find ways to satisfy the letter of the law while avoiding the law's underlying goal.

surveilance industry adopted a "dark pattern" that annoys people to no end (the popups) so as to paint the GDPR in a bad light

We should in fact blame lawmakers when they fail to anticipate the obvious consequences of their laws.

This industry could've easily said "If we see a DNT header with level:x and domainmask:*, we'll assume NO to every tracking cookie and won't collect them".

If they were the type of people to do that, then they wouldn't have been doing the invasive tracking in the first place.

The GDPR would be far better if it simply banned individualized tracking. It would be somewhat better if it explicitly specified that sites must honor browser headers and specified the exact UI to use when requesting permissions.

Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies

#99

Post by skeeter2020 »

Cookie banners are a bad/wrong solution to the underlying problem, but it's the dark patterns within that really piss me off. I shouldn't have to invest deep cognitive attention to "only accept mandatory" but if you're not careful many dialogs will trick you into clicking accept all after you go to the trouble to untoggle all the optional shit. The answer is to use isolation containers, aggressively reset them and not to worry about any of this.

Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies

#100

Post by skeeter2020 »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #75
coldpie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think these websites give a shit about your privacy because you clicked on a div with a "No" in it? Not a chance. It's like asking thieves to promise not to steal from you. Protecting users is the browser's job: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote... https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cooki...

I'm currently at a small ad tech firm and while I can't speak for other outfits, we definitely are extra careful about respecting user consent indicators. Because we are small, it's not easy to do this, because there are many possible ways for users to "reject". This includes situations that merely imply non-consent due to inaction, rather than active non-consent like a reject cookie indicator, or living in a jurisdi…

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