Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in the early days, browsers used to prompt you for every cookie: https://i.imgur.com/FThIFHe.png
i don't think i ever saw that. which browser?
Maemo's Web used to do that if I recall correctly.
Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
211–220 of 509 posts
Re: Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
#212This shows utter incompetence and detachment from reality by European legislators. Maybe it seemed like good idea in theory but the only practical significant impact is that browsing the web has become more annoying. Surely there are solutions that don't require a popup on every webpage you visit? For example enforcing no tracking by default for advertising purposes?
> This shows utter incompetence and detachment from reality by European legislators.
> Surely there are solutions that don't require a popup on every webpage you visit? For example enforcing no tracking by default for advertising purposes?
Wait, what? There are such solutions. GDPR, and the "cookie law" before it, don't "require" any popups.
They allow cookies, 1x1 pixel images, browser fingerprinting, Flash supercookies, browser local storage, etc. without any need for stupid popups... as long as that's required to implement the site's functionality. Consent for these things is implied by the user's use of the functionality (e.g. game scoreboards, saving word processor documents, keeping track of a user's shopping cart, etc.).
What these laws do require is that handling such personal data without such implied consent, should require explicit consent. This acts as a disincentive for sites who want to continue spying on their visitors, by forcing the UX to be more annoying and dissuade visitors from staying.
> the only practical significant impact is that browsing the web has become more annoying.
Sounds like the dissuasion is working. Hopefully that is causing spyware sites to receive fewer visitors (and perhaps revenue), and potentially rethink their decisions.
Re: Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Websites are allowed to charge you. They are also allowed to show (non-tracking) ads, and they can also track you if you agree to it. What is not allowed is to withdraw services to those that want to exercise their right to privacy.
Thanks, this helps clear up some of my understanding. I still think its ridiculous that websites can't refuse to serve who they want.
Why? It's relatively common for governments to prohibit businesses and services from discriminating against certain types of users, why do you think it's ridiculous in this specific case?
Re: Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
#214Re: Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, saying it's ridiculous isn't an argument. it's expensive and maybe non-viable for many websites. But it's not like all websites need to exist? There was a world wide web before cookies.
>There was a world wide web before cookies. I like to think of that time as a great time too, but oh man so much we couldn't do.... I get what you're saying generally, but man I'd hate "before cookies" to be the standard.
The big use of cookies for re-authentication and carrying around a session id enabled clean URLs lacking your session id as a query param, but it wouldn't be that big of a deal to lose it. You'd need to be careful with copy-pasting URLs -- but given browsers standardized on cookies they could have standardized on a sessionId param name to filter out of copy-pastes or not even display it at all similar to Chrome's proposal to not display the protocol, just a "secure" flag or not. A similar "session context established" flag could have been made. And in the age of password managers and/or having your browser remember your login, it wouldn't be that much of a loss to require logging in to everything again every time you restart your browser... maybe more of a pain with 2FA.
I don't really see it as "what we couldn't do" but "what poor usability we have overcome". I'm glad we have cookies and other forms of local storage, especially for the latter there are many other benefits. Maybe one day we'll get Web SQL.
In the meantime people can still disable cookies entirely, or at least delete them when they close the browser, both with out of the box browser settings (and I have no idea what extensions are available to do even more) and return to that less-usable (if slightly more private) experience. The crucial idea of a "user agent" is I think the biggest mindset change the web brought, it's important to keep that even if on the dev side we constantly complain about being asked to support more than one configuration of anything.
Re: Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
#216That post reminded me about the https://amiunique.org/ site for seeing how trackable you are with browser fingerprints.
I had remembered that I had installed a "Random User-Agent" plugin in Chrome, with privacy concerns in mind. Sometimes it sends a user-agent that causes a site to send me a page that can't actually be rendered by my browser, so I have to turn it off on some sites.
But I was curious to see what amiunique.org would make of the various random user-agent strings that the plugin would send it.
Ironically, the plugin seems to break the amiunique.org site, I can only get a whitescreen or occasionally a spinner forever, unless I disable the "random user-agent" plugin.
Not sure what to make of that.
Re: Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Websites are allowed to charge you. They are also allowed to show (non-tracking) ads, and they can also track you if you agree to it. What is not allowed is to withdraw services to those that want to exercise their right to privacy.
Thanks, this helps clear up some of my understanding. I still think its ridiculous that websites can't refuse to serve who they want.
Agreed. I think of it akin to smoking, drinking, drugs, speeding, or various other acts you can partake in. The government should largely stay out of your life but society has deemed some things "for your own good". In this case, I could see certain types of advertisements or data harvesting which is largely misunderstood to be managed by the government, where they decide that companies can't track you - whether you want them to or not.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying I agree with any of this. Nor that any of this is truth in any way. I just view the governments involvement here, saying how ad companies can behave, to be similar. Whether that is good or bad is complicated, and out of the scope of this conversation.
Re: Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
So websites are supposed to just absorb the cost? That seems like a ridiculous stance.
No, they're supposed to serve generic, non-tracking ads. Non-targeted, or whatever the terminology is. It's hilarious how everyone has just forgotten that used to be a thing. The people on this website are literally the problem, you can't even conceive of a website that doesn't track every click you make across the whole internet, and you guys are the people building the new web.
It’s not possible to do a lot of normal web stuff without session cookies.
Re: Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
#219In The Netherlands the Data Protection Authority announced this month that websites are no longer allowed to block access when people click "NO" in the cookie warning; Clicking 'no' should still allow people to view the website, but without placing any tracking cookies. Source (in Dutch): https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/nl/nieuws/websites-moe...
Hmm, there are features that one literally can't provide without state (cookies).
I think the real problem here is that the technical feature of cookies providing browser state is a poor proxy for what EU/DPA _really_ wants to regulate, which is privacy-related tracking.
There are tons of sites I've written which use cookies, but have no ads and perform no user-tracking whatsoever, not even Google Analytics. It is true that cookies are the _easiest_ (if not the only) way to do the other; but making "cookies" the thing that gets effectively "regulated"... I realize this isn't necessarily the intent of the regulations, but I'm suggesting it's part of what results in the situation troy mentions. There are very few sites that don't use cookies; there are or at least could be more sites that don't track you in a privacy-compromising way, to train the user that this is the same thing is just too much noise for the user to actually make any discernments.
Re: Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
#220This shows utter incompetence and detachment from reality by European legislators. Maybe it seemed like good idea in theory but the only practical significant impact is that browsing the web has become more annoying. Surely there are solutions that don't require a popup on every webpage you visit? For example enforcing no tracking by default for advertising purposes?
> Surely there are solutions that don't require a popup on every webpage you visit? I don't get any popups or cookie notices on visiting HN or several other sites. It's not like it's a fundamental need to set hundreds of tracking cookies on a visitor's browser to show them a website.
HN doesn't have ads though.