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

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121–130 of 265 posts

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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

why do you dislike targeted advertising?

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

#122
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 maj…

> imposing rules on others, the majority of their rules have unintended consequences, can be taken advantage of, are usually designed by committees

It's a valid critique, so here goes: how would you implement it to avoid those?

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

#123

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:/…

why are ads a menace to society?

edit: thanks for the thoughtful response, downvoters!

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why they didn't use the Do-Not-Track header. It's perfect: a client sending DNT is explicitly denying consent to any form of tracking before the page is even rendered. The presence of such a header should cause web applications to automatically delete any and all tracking javascript from their pages at the very least. No idea why it turned into this cookie banner nonsense.

Microsoft pulled an Apple and turned DNT into opt-in. Advertisers were very clear that they would only honor DNT if it people were tracked by default. The EU then passed a bill that said you can't collect data unless it's for one of six reasons, one of which is "user consent". This basically mandated opt-in, so everyone went super-aggressive on consent banners (which, BTW, are probably illegal).

Consent popups are legal so long as agreeing is not easier than disagreeing. Iow, you cannot make it harder to disagree - which 99.95% of them do.

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

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why they didn't use the Do-Not-Track header. It's perfect: a client sending DNT is explicitly denying consent to any form of tracking before the page is even rendered. The presence of such a header should cause web applications to automatically delete any and all tracking javascript from their pages at the very least. No idea why it turned into this cookie banner nonsense.

Microsoft pulled an Apple and turned DNT into opt-in. Advertisers were very clear that they would only honor DNT if it people were tracked by default. The EU then passed a bill that said you can't collect data unless it's for one of six reasons, one of which is "user consent". This basically mandated opt-in, so everyone went super-aggressive on consent banners (which, BTW, are probably illegal).

> Advertisers were very clear that they would only honor DNT if it people were tracked by default.

It's ridiculous that Microsoft's response wasn't to just nuke trackers from space with some kind of adware blocker integration in Edge. This is the equivalent of a mugger saying he'll only honour your "do no mug" sign if the sign defaults to "mug me please" and has to be explicitly changed.

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

#127
I'm from a generation when gopher was still in wide use. I remember those Flash animations from the 00s. I remember being optimistic in my youth about the internet and how it would change the world. Lots of thought leaders were writing about that. The way we live might have changed, but the world view from which we operate from did not. It should have been a red flag for me that the early commercialization of the Internet characterized it as a "land grab".

I've come to the conclusion for myself that I don't like the internet as it is now. The advertising is annoying, but more importantly for me I don't like the idea of being defined by my user behavior, and getting sucked into a machine feedback loop with no real Purpose ... simply something that endlessly extracts value for no other reason than to extract value. So I find myself:

1. Repeatedly using the least amount of cookies every time I read it. When I come across papers posted here from _Nature_, I opt out of cookies. That means I do have to reselect those every time.

2. As a habit, I just do it out of all of the sites that offer this. I think part of this is that I have to pick and choose what I spend time reading

3. Yes, and there are workarounds for all of those. I also use adblock, but they are kinda like the mob and will let advertisers pay them to bypass the adblock. Sites that don't show me the content because they detect an adblock makes me think if I really want to read what is on there; if I do, I don't mind making a conscious choice to support the publication. If I am annoyed by it, I might try the Firefox Reader option. Or I don't read it.

4. It's not an advantage so much as aligning with how I have come to approach life. I've come to realize that much of our civilization is built upon Value Extraction. Whether that is for my limited time here on Earth, my focus and attention, very few businesses are built to give something back, or at least are value-adding (not "value added") -- something that contributes to and expands the capabilities and resources of the whole ecosystem beyond profitability.

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

#128

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:/…

why are ads a menace to society? edit: thanks for the thoughtful response, downvoters!

normalizes expectation of others inserting ideas in ones head instead of critically assessing concepts with available observations and deriving one's own opinion for starters

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

#130
I have wondered about this also. I do most of my browsing in incognito windows, where cookies are not remembered once the window is closed. Am I correct in thinking it does not matter if I accept everything, since it will all be nuked in short order? Or is there a chance I am unwittingly allowing cross-session tracking based on IP or other attributes?
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