Because 90% of the time cookies are used only for tracking. Unless a site has a login mechanism, and I have a profile on it I don't see the reason to consent on the use of cookies. Since I installed uMatrix I don't even get the annoying notification.
People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?
101–110 of 265 posts
Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
>No, they're asking for consent to track because the EU demanded it. Given that you can completely block cookies and other tracking in the browser, why on earth did they bother? I despise bureaucrats writing laws when they don't understand technology.
I despise engineers writing code when they don't understand laws. Yes, we can play the tracker-removal cat-and-mouse game, but that involves a lot of time and effort, projected forever . This battle is going to be won by whoever has the most time and money to waste, and, spoiler alert: it's not the adblock vendors. It's Google. In the specific case of cookies, you need those to authenticate to web services, so you ca…
Preach! What we ultimately need is just a law that says it is illegal for companies to collect or store any data for marketing purposes, tracking, or resale. No opt ins, no exceptions. Unfortunately we can't fully kill targeted or unsolicited advertising at the root because of freedom of speech issues, but we can eliminate all the data it depends on.
Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?
#103The "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 y…
Businesses want to learn about their users in order to better serve them. however customers although they want to have their problems fixed, rarely tell the business about their problems.
Restaurants have strict rules not to serve bad food. There are however no rule against serving bad solutions.
Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?
#104Why click anything on the banner at all? I either ignore it, leave the page, use Firefox's reader mode, or delete the DOM node. uBlock Origin has a nice "zapper" feature to do that last option quickly and painlessly.
Even sites with full-page overlays usually load the actual page behind the overlay, so you can just delete the node if you really want to keep using the site.
Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?
#105I don't want to interact with a bunch of options, what I want is to have the minimum amount of tracking required to have the site work for me. The fact that most sites confront you with either accepting all tracking or having to manually disable all other forms is a dark design pattern imo. Also sites that seemingly forget what you stated and re-ask you every time is unacceptable. The stack exchange banner I find particularly vexing, and ublock rule to remove it is unreliable. And yes, of course I'm not going to object to them placing a cookie 'cookie-banner-accepted' or something to remember my decision. Again, not against ALL cookies, I just want the minimum required for site functionality, which I think would be almost a universal preference of most users but of course you wouldn't guess that from these ridiculous pop ups
Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Essential cookies that are necessary for the website to run do not need a permission from the user. For example, if you want to use cookies to save a selection or a language setting, you don't need to ask for permission.
Yep - but to clarify, the cookies must really be NECESSARY - i.e. your site or app would be unusable without the feature they implement. A cookie that saves, for instance, a preference may not be considered essential but a "Functional Cookie" that adds extra features, because your app is usable without it, and then you do need permission for it.
IANAL, but from my understanding the GDPR itself does not make this distinction. It's okay to store things to implement functionality, like login or shopping baskets. Tracking people is not okay.
Now, there was a different directive preceeding the GDPR that tried to address the rampant abuse of cookies for tracking by regulating cookies directly. The intention of that directive was good, but the implementation really bad. I think this is where this distinction comes from. I don't think I've seen a case where someone who was not doing blatantly shady things with cookies got into trouble with that directive, though.
It doesn't have to be obnoxious either - if you have a preferences page, you could add something like "we'll save these preferences in a cookie on your computer, okay?"
Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Exactly. This is an absolute key point I find most people miss in these discussions.
GDPR fundamentally changes the default of whether tracking is allowed to occur or not. If a user browses the web automatically blocking (just deleting/blocking the element, not automatically clicking accept) every consent pop-up, the website is not allowed to track them nor is it allowed to block the user from using the website.
If you had such a browser extension, and if websites were actually conforming to the law, all EU users could browse the web without ever seeing any popup and without ever getting tracked.
Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep - but to clarify, the cookies must really be NECESSARY - i.e. your site or app would be unusable without the feature they implement. A cookie that saves, for instance, a preference may not be considered essential but a "Functional Cookie" that adds extra features, because your app is usable without it, and then you do need permission for it.
Well, what does unusable mean? If my app offers a feature and the cookie is necessary for it to work, then it's essential. For example, a cart feature in an ecommerce app. Could you shop without a cart? Sure, still I would consider this cookie essential.
The UK implementation of ePrivacy makes this quite clear and the regulator uses this as an example [1] in their guidance.
If you are setting the cookie in direct response to a user initiated action, for functionality, that doesn't require consent.
[1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/guidance-...
Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?
#109The 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.
This extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-fixed-el... has worked wonders for me for naive stalking popups. Some sites disable scrolling until the popup has sufficiently annoyed the user into clicking "accept all", though.
Re: People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?
#110> 3. Do you know about some instruments like DO-NOT-TRACK but for cookie banners? Adblock or adblock-like extentions IMO miss the point of doing the conscious decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P was the standard for this, and was implemented in IE for many years.
However, back then there were no legal consequences to tracking without consent, so no sites bothered providing the metadata; and the support in user agents was dropped.