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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?

#241

Post by Nextgrid »

naoqj wrote: post #112
eropple wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The GDPR covers the intent and processing of the data rather than any specific technical means - it's not limited to cookies. Please see my other comment for why implementing that in-browser is not feasible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30964163

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

#243

Post by Nextgrid »

pc86 wrote: post #28
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…

What I don't understand is why a food blog run by someone in Kansas has cookie consent popups. You're not in Europe. Large multinational corporations I can understand. But it seems like most websites have these popups now even though most hosting and most content generation occurs somewhere other than the EU.

There's a huge industry around this bullshit that intentionally spreads FUD and misinformation to scare website operators into purchasing their "solution" even though they may not be affected in the first place.

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

#244

Post by dredmorbius »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #223
dredmorbius wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you mention "delete the cookie banners and associated tracking completely" without specifying methods: On browsers which support it, I use uMatrix and uBlock Origin, as well as the Stylus CSS manager. uBlock Origin has an element remover that will permanently remove elements from a website. It's point-and-click, though you may need to hunt a bit to find the full element responsible for annoyances. (There's also…

> Since you mention "delete the cookie banners and associated tracking completely" without specifying methods For clarity, I was suggesting that site owners eliminate the banners and associated tracking. That said, I'd certainly second the recommendation for uBlock Origin.

I was suggesting that site owners eliminate the banners and associated tracking.

Filed under: things I'm not holding my breath for.

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

#245

Post by 8note »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #121
OminousWeapons wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Generally the ads that are targetting me are unrelated to things that I want.

But also, much of ads are scams, and the targetting helps the scammers find susceptible targets

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

#246

Post by cplusplusfellow »

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…

It’s an absolute pity that the legislature didn’t require : deny everything : remember my selection : if the same analytics package exists on other sites, remember my g’d selection

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

#247

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

Nextgrid wrote: post #222
david422 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it part of the browser, not the website.

The "make it part of the browser" argument doesn't work in practice because the GDPR covers the intent and purpose of data collection/processing rather than any specific technical way of collecting or processing said data. Blocking cookies at the browser level doesn't prevent the website from using browser fingerprinting or the information you manually provided (your delivery address to make a purchase for example) i…

I’d really like a way for my browser to tell sites my default preferences, just to reduce browser noise.

I’d probably prefer more for the advertising industry to die a fast death, but I doubt that will ever happen.

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

#248

Post by kmeisthax »

AlexandrB wrote: post #126
kmeisthax wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ad blocking is not a "nuke trackers from space" button. It's more like piloting a drone fleet to pick out and kill terrorists or insurgents in a not-so-friendly country. It requires lots of work to identify ads and create comprehensive filter rules to block ads, and periodic re-checking to make sure they haven't been broken by the advertising companies.

Note how most ad blocking tech is either community-run FOSS projects or companies with not-so-savory business practices. It's really not the kind of work that browser vendors want to do. In fact, Apple went out of their way to create an extension type purely for delivering ad block lists to Safari all the way back in iOS 9. Ad blocking is that much of a pain that even Apple was willing to farm it out to third parties years before we got proper mobile extension support.

Occasionally, browser vendors get lucky, and there's a tracker type that's "easy enough" to kill. Things like third-party cookies would be one of them - but even then this required a huge amount of testing to avoid breaking apps that relied on them for authentication.

The only reason why ad block even works is because ad companies are incredibly paranoid and don't trust each other. The standard way to do display ads is to embed each other's ``s or JS, which gives ad blockers a nice easy target to hit. Platforms like Facebook or Twitter that are trusted to do their own ad delivery and thus don't hotlink subresources are far harder to block. They can change how ads are styled basically every hour if they wanted, which would make any kind of rule-based ad blocking ineffective. If every ad platform did this, ad block as we know it would be dead.

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

#249

Post by sowbug »

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…

and should probably be handled on the browser-level if people care about it.

Some of the original Chrome browser team have followed this line of thought:

https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-cookie-cutter-by-neeva-a-...

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