It would be cool if we could develop a protocol where users could flip a setting on their browser that tells every website they visit that the user has consciously, legally opted-in to all cookies. Heck, it would be cool to also have an option that says I accept all your Privacy Policies and Terms of Agreement, so don't show me any banners related to those either.
Cookie policy notifications have ruined user experience on the web
41–50 of 87 posts
Re: Cookie policy notifications have ruined user experience on the web
#42Are Cookie policy notifications a thing outside of the EU? I always assumed that websites geo target these notifications and life with the small risk of corner cases (like EU customer in the US). If anyone has experience, or numbers I’d find that highly interesting.
One datapoint from Germany: We were largely unaffected by cookie notifications before GDPR, because of a local law (TMG) that superseded the EU “cookie law”.
Since GDPR we are in the curious situation that every small and medium sized business plasters it’s website with extravagant opt-in notification pop-ups while the worst privacy offenders, like the nations largest newspapers, bombard you with all kinds of cookies with no notification at all.
Just one example I tried a few moments ago:
spiegel.de one of the most widely read German-language news sites set 54 cookies from lots of different domains plus local storage usage. No cookie notification whatsoever.
Another example: bundesregierung.de, the official government website, states in it’s privacy policy that they set a web analytics cookie (Matomo) but they don’t show a notification either.
Re: Cookie policy notifications have ruined user experience on the web
#43We wouldn't be having this discussion if cookies were opt-in rather than opt-out. I don't sign into 90% of websites I visit, but why are all of them allowed to track me? If cookies were opt-in, then the legal issue of "consent" would be cleanly resolved, and the interface can be handled by the user agent rather than through obtrusive modals.
You visited them and you didn't turn off your browser's cookie requests; therefore you decided to accept the files that the site offer to your browser.
You make a fair point -- it's popular to take the same tack with web servers and ad blocking (a server makes content publicly available -- users can decide which parts to view). Not a stretch to apply the same logic both ways -- just because a server offers a file to you, doesn't mean you are forced to store and give the file back on demand.
If this view were more widely adopted, it would maybe pressure browser vendors into being more transparent with users on cookie management and proactively ask them how they want to handle them.
Re: Cookie policy notifications have ruined user experience on the web
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much any site with a login is using cookies to do it
Sure but to create a login there is a transaction of consent.
Exactly. No one -has- to add a cookie that tracks you across sites they don’t even own. They can easily be used for authentication and session management without scraping a bunch of personal information from every visitor, logged in or not
Re: Cookie policy notifications have ruined user experience on the web
#45It would be cool if we could develop a protocol where users could flip a setting on their browser that tells every website they visit that the user has consciously, legally opted-in to all cookies. Heck, it would be cool to also have an option that says I accept all your Privacy Policies and Terms of Agreement, so don't show me any banners related to those either.
> a setting on their browser that tells every website they visit that the user has consciously, legally opted-in to all cookies
IMO, you do this when you open the browser. Why does every website need to explain how the internet works?
Re: Cookie policy notifications have ruined user experience on the web
#46They’re terrible. Who are we kidding, no one has backed out of the website after seeing one of these notices.
I back out of them all time.
Particularly the egregious dark-pattern ones: "Click this giant green button to let us track you out the wazoo, or click this tiny misleadingly-named link to drag you through a six-hour hell of settings dialogs which will drop you out without actually changing anything the instant it thinks it can get away with it."
Re: Cookie policy notifications have ruined user experience on the web
#47How ironic, websites have been breaking user experience for years by embedding always more trackers that took forever to load. If a publisher doesn't want to display a GDPR notification to its users there's a simple trick : just don't collect and monetize personal informations!
Even if we use cookies for basic sessions (absolutely no personal tracking, just session ID) - Isn't it mandatory to show "Cookie bar" on the said site?
Re: Cookie policy notifications have ruined user experience on the web
#48We wouldn't be having this discussion if cookies were opt-in rather than opt-out. I don't sign into 90% of websites I visit, but why are all of them allowed to track me? If cookies were opt-in, then the legal issue of "consent" would be cleanly resolved, and the interface can be handled by the user agent rather than through obtrusive modals.
As a workaround, we can disable them on the whole and enable on per site basis (the 10% of websites you sign into). Its a hassle but yeah ...
Re: Cookie policy notifications have ruined user experience on the web
#49We wouldn't be having this discussion if cookies were opt-in rather than opt-out. I don't sign into 90% of websites I visit, but why are all of them allowed to track me? If cookies were opt-in, then the legal issue of "consent" would be cleanly resolved, and the interface can be handled by the user agent rather than through obtrusive modals.
The problem is, the purpose of cookies isn't tracking, they're a hack to maintain state between requests for what's supposed to be a stateless protocol (and until HTML5 came along with session storage and local storage, they were the only way to do that in the browser.) So cookies are useful (and often used) for purposes besides tracking and advertising. Having cookies be opt-in by default would just punish anyone us…
Cookies were never the only way to do this. Before cookies became popular having the ability to create a session was still possible. The primary method of doing this was similar to cookies, have a sessionId parameter to your query. There were also passive ways of profiling a user's client to isolate it based on what it looked like (IP, User Agent, user agent Accept and Accept Charset, etc see [0]).
[0] http://www.rkeene.org/viewer/tmp/wwwftp_cgi.c.htm#line182
Re: Cookie policy notifications have ruined user experience on the web
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be interested to know what percentage of sites would actually lose functionality. At a crude estimate, >90% of the sites that show me cookie warnings do everything I actually want them to statelessly. And I have some backup for that, because when I block cookies by default very few sites actually seem to get worse. Are there clever user-aiding tricks with cookies that I don't realize I'm losing? Or is the average…
Pretty much any site with a login is using cookies to do it
Just to add to this, if you disable cookies, localStorage also goes so not only cookies, any site using storage would also be impacted.