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People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?

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Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?

#91
I'm mostly mad at the dark patterns used. The ones that are accept vs decline are fine and usually I just add them to ublock if I'm going to visit that site again. An example of annoying is stack overflow. There are "essential" cookies that I have to accept. And to get there I have to navigate a few places. Luckily they aren't as aggressive about covering up the content so usually I just ignore it. Unfortunately I haven't successfully added this to unlock. And I have an automatic cookie destroyer. Tell me again why your cookies are essential and I have to accept them? (Yes I know cookies are needed to save settings, but maybe only prompt at the time I would need them, like login. I don't need cookies to just browse SO)

Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?

#92

As a consumer: I hate cookie banners. Ads are a menace to society and the banners are a manifestation of a toddler fighting against the rules by being a total nuisance. When there's something I need from a site, I will always go into the "manage" route and save the disabled cookies. I also use duckduckgo's privacy browser and burn my session often. As a provider: I don't use cookies. Here's my privacy policy: https:/…

Upvoted, this viewpoint seriously needs to become the norm, thank you for providing it.

Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?

#93
I have found an upside to the cookie banners. They make me evaluate how much I care about the content hidden behind them. Especially when there is not a "deny all" button clearly visible. A significant amount of the time, I just close the browser window and go somewhere else.

Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?

#94
The "privacy banners" have become a clear signal to me that the given web site is (at best) too lazy to fix their site or (at worst) deliberately hostile to my privacy. The banner's presence is an easy up-front filter: I just click away and go to a different site. I usually don't care enough about your content to go through and click off a bunch of switches. Switches that you only have to show because you won't fix your web site and remove the tracking yourself.

Imagine if the government passed a law that said restaurants had to warn you upfront that there might be poison in your food and you had to opt-out of it. I think I would just avoid restaurants with that sign altogether.

Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?

#95
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, they're asking for consent to track because the EU demanded it. Personally, I think that despite seemingly good intentions, this common practice is counterintuitively harming user-privacy and security, especially on mobile where the banners take up a large chunk of the screen. Many normal people get something like "banner-blindness": they are so used to seeing banners requesting confirmation when they visit a w…

> Personally, I think that despite seemingly good intentions Why do you think they have good intentions? Many of these banners employ some pretty slick dark patterns for you to opt-in to their most critical analytics. One of my favorites is when cookie selection is more than one click from the banner, or it causes a page reload.

I've seen a few of those where you reject all and it causes a page reload, hence putting you in a loop where the banner comes back.

Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?

#96

>those in charge of the cookie banners really believe that they protect the interests of the user No, they're asking for consent to track because the EU demanded it. The easiest way to avoid having a banner on your site is to... just not have an analytics package on your site. They're aggressive because they don't want their data spigot turned off - hence the work-to-rule nonsense. You should not infer any benevolenc…

At least in the EU most sites seem to automatically disable nonessential cookies if you don't click Accept. The American equivalents all force you to manually uncheck everything

And if someone wrote a browser extension that hides those popups (or makes them scrollable instead of sticky), the user would not need to do anything to reject cookies.

Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?

#97
> 4. If you are such an advanced user of cookie-banners then it is natural for you to think they are somewhat useful for you - what are the advantages of this?

They're not useful, they're an unwanted annoyance. Nobody wants to fill out a cookie form, they want to browse the site. Delete the cookie banners and the associated tracking completely.

Figuring out whatever tortuous process any particular cookie banner uses in lieu of what should be an equally prominent "reject all" button (or a completely absent banner and no tracking) does not make me an "advanced user of cookie banners".

> 3. Do you know about some instruments like DO-NOT-TRACK but for cookie banners?

Yes, Do-Not-Track is precisely that instrument. (And occasionally, some of the cookie banners seem to notice the do-not-track and use it to pre-populate all the checkboxes to "no".) If a site receives a Do-Not-Track, it should not show a cookie banner, and should just auto-reject all tracking. (If a site doesn't receive a Do-Not-Track, it should also not show a cookie banner, and should still auto-reject all tracking.)

> Adblock or adblock-like extentions IMO miss the point of doing the conscious decision.

There shouldn't need to be a conscious decision; all of the banners and tracking should be auto-rejected.

Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?

#98

The more aggressive and dark-UX the banner is, the more likely I am to spend time figuring out how to reject everything or to just close the tab right away. If it doesn't try to trick me into accepting things, I sometimes actually consider doing that. Why don't I just accept them all? No idea. Out of spite? Principles? Because I have too much time? Because my mind is too eager to get distracted with the popup? The fa…

I do right-click -> inspect element and then delete the pop-up element in the browser source viewer thing on chrome. Sometimes I have to find where it says “overflow” and set it to “overflow: visible” or something like that. Remarkable how often that works.

Yup, that's one of the strategies I sometimes employ as well :)

Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?

#99
As others have said, I usually click "refuse" or accept the very minimum possible, if it doesn't look fishy.

If there's too much work, like I have to uncheck every one of a zillion boxes, or if there's the trustarc or what's-it-called that needs to "work on it" for 10 minutes, I just leave the site.

I do this in the hopes that someone in marketing looks at the stats of people specifically refusing, takes note, and maybe comes up with something less invasive. Or at least realizes there's a market for that.

There is one site on which I don't do this, jeuxvideo.com. It's a French video game review site. They present a choice: "accept tracking" or "pay for a subscription". I only go there once in a blue moon, so a subscription wouldn't make sense for me. Plus, their ads aren't particularly intrusive (with UBlock on, but on MS Edge - which I barely use, since it runs on my gaming PC) so I figure it's fair.

Most sites that present the cookie banned don't usually have a subscription-based alternative.

Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?

#100
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, they're asking for consent to track because the EU demanded it. Personally, I think that despite seemingly good intentions, this common practice is counterintuitively harming user-privacy and security, especially on mobile where the banners take up a large chunk of the screen. Many normal people get something like "banner-blindness": they are so used to seeing banners requesting confirmation when they visit a w…

> Personally, I think that despite seemingly good intentions Why do you think they have good intentions? Many of these banners employ some pretty slick dark patterns for you to opt-in to their most critical analytics. One of my favorites is when cookie selection is more than one click from the banner, or it causes a page reload.

I think you're talking about the businesses' motivations and I'm talking about the random EU bureaucrats that imposed the regulations. Despite how skeptical I am of most government interventions, I'd tend to assign benign intentions on the bureaucrats part here as I'd have to guess that they genuinely wanted to do something good. But like any bureaucrats sitting in their ivory towers imposing rules on others, the majority of their rules have unintended consequences, can be taken advantage of, are usually designed by committees that even when well-intentioned produce a mish-mash of inconsistent ideas, etc.
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