Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 265 posts

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

#111

Post by shadowgovt »

kmeisthax wrote: post #3

>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…

Keeping in mind, of course, that Apache access logging in its default configuration probably counts as "an analytics package."

If you're running a site, it's just safer to ask than to assume that you know your site is not tracking users.

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

#112

Post by naoqj »

eropple wrote: post #26
Aardwolf wrote: post #19

I use a plugin called "idontcareaboutcookies" to not see them because I don't want anything requiring interaction just to read stuff anywhere The internet used to have pop ups in the early 2000s, until popup blockers and then the Mozilla browser came. Then we had over a decade of no pop-ups. Then Europe decided to make the internet a worse place by requiring websites to put something that's essentially a pop-up (the…

This is a misunderstanding of the situation. Providers made those banners big, annoying, and full of dark patterns because they want you to agree to those cookies. They didn't have to have a bunch of check boxes right next to an "Accept All" button--this was a conscious choice by those providers. You are being targeted by malicious compliance so you dislike the thing that they want gone . This is a sucker's game, and…

Some of us don't give a shit about tracking and are forced to go through all those stupid banners. So yes, I blame the EU. There should be some HTTP header that you could set to say that you accept everything. It's opt-in so the EU bureaucrats should be OK with it.

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

#114

Post by shadowgovt »

logicalmonster wrote: post #21
kmeisthax wrote: post #3

>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…

> 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…

It's a modern variant of the "this site is unsafe, continue using" click through that browsers gave for incorrectly configured SSL before the major browser vendors converged on the conclusion that they should make it actively hard to pass through insufficiently-secured SSL configuration because users would just click okay on the spooky dialog.

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

#116

Post by shadowgovt »

kmeisthax wrote: post #80
JTbane wrote: post #31

Earlier 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…

Fortunately, we have replaced the tracker removal cat and mouse game with a consent banner cat and mouse game, projected forever.

Problem solved, am I right? ;)

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

#117

Post by ClumsyPilot »

JTbane wrote: post #31
kmeisthax wrote: post #3

>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…

>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.

"Given that you can completely block cookies"

You can also hire oricate security to stop stalkers, and yet stalking is illegal

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

#119

Post by tick_tock_tick »

eropple wrote: post #33
enlyth wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree, every website I visit now has an annoying cookie overlay, which requires interaction from the user. Just let me read the damn article! I don't care if you track a single visit to this website which I will never come back to. I can protect my privacy myself if I want to, the EU is not helping at all because there are just dark patterns everywhere to make not accepting cookies difficult or inconvenien…

"This law should fail because people who want this law to fail are complying maliciously" is one of the more out-there readings of reality I have seen in some time. Perhaps, rather than shrugging one's shoulders and saying "well, to hell with you, I've got mine," there are other things we as a functioning society can do. Like standardize how these cookie prompts must be displayed (small, inobtrusive) and standardize…

People can be complying maliciously and the law can be bad at the same time. I doubt most people actually thinks the EU struck a good balancing with the current laws.

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

#120

Post by bittercynic »

I use a ublock origin filter list that attempts to block cookie banners.

If I could find a web-search tool that de-listed or harshly penalized sites with hostile features I would use that.

Likely related to advertising/tracking: Many common categories of activity, like cooking, gardening, camping... are very hard to search for. The results are so polluted that I can't find the good web sites, and I'm certain people who love these activities have created great sites about them.

Post reply on HN