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

Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

blog.tomayac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 231 posts

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#91

Post by hedora »

ajross wrote: post #84
user3939382 wrote: post #65

I just want to take this opportunity to thank "adtech" and everyone working in it for making local storage way more complex than it otherwise needed to be because you couldn't/can't stop yourselves from abusing users.

This is a good example of how the discourse on this subject seems to have twisted itself around. No one serious ever thought "advertising" was a bad thing, not really. It was the potential abuse of the stored data people were worried about. But that's hard to explain, especially without good examples to which to point[1]. So fast forward a few years and... now it's "adtech" that's the enemy in isolation. That seems u…

The big ad companies definitely have not been good stewards.

Here's an ongoing example that should get someone put in jail:

Pharmaceutical companies target ads for addictive drugs at the people that are most likely to become addicted to those drugs.

(For the victim of this that I know personally, it wasn't painkillers. As far as I know, there have been no repercussions for the manufacturer of the drug in question or the ad networks.)

See also: The millions of comments on any thread on HN that discusses SEO, dark patterns, cookie consent, or apps that interfere with advertising revenue streams.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#92

Post by vxNsr »

bmismyname wrote: post #63
cbsks wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using Cookie AutoDelete for that purpose for the last few years. It works flawlessly for me and brings me comfort in knowing that I am only being tracked online by my browser fingerprint and IP. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...

Same, I absolutely love this extension. You can whitelist the websites you use frequently, and for everything else it's like a groundhog day every day. The cookie banners can be super annoying sometimes, but they are easily removed with uBlock Origin. I also frequently have to solve captchas, but it's not so bad. For example, every time I visit amazon.com to order toilet paper or whatever, it thinks I'm a bot, but at…

If you go to Amazon a lot why not whitelist?

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#93

Post by worble »

vxNsr wrote: post #92
bmismyname wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, I absolutely love this extension. You can whitelist the websites you use frequently, and for everything else it's like a groundhog day every day. The cookie banners can be super annoying sometimes, but they are easily removed with uBlock Origin. I also frequently have to solve captchas, but it's not so bad. For example, every time I visit amazon.com to order toilet paper or whatever, it thinks I'm a bot, but at…

If you go to Amazon a lot why not whitelist?

I personally wouldn't whitelist any site that has my card details saved.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#94

Post by hk__2 »

hoseja wrote: post #18
eterevsky wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the website wants to do something on the first user's visit, it would start doing it on every page load. Letting the website know that the user has disabled cookies can help avoid it and improve user experience.

Letting the website know anything at all lets it track you, as we learn time and time again.

It already has your IP.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#95

Post by hedora »

ajross wrote: post #90
topaz0 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true -- many people think advertising as practiced is abusive in its own right.

"Society as a whole" and "many people" are not the same entities. Again, there was a time when serious discourse about internet privacy focused on abuse potential and how to provide data security guarantees. Now it's just "ads bad", and I think that's a real problem with the discourse. To repeat, you can win fights over privacy (c.f. the GDPR, which while pretty flawed was a real and tangible win for users). You'll n…

The vast majority of Americans are concerned about data collection:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa...

There's no point in additional discourse on the issue. We may as well be arguing about whether cigarettes cure lung disease.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#96

Post by orev »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #46
orev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Cookies” is shorthand for “persistent storage” because nobody outside of web developers knows other methods exist. When people, laws, banners, etc. refer to cookies, they mean “any technology that stores information on the client side systems”. Whatever mechanism is used is irrelevant to the meaning/concept.

> “Cookies” is shorthand for “persistent storage” because nobody outside of web developers knows other methods exist Most people don't know what "cookies" means either. We shouldn't make the problem worse by giving them false information.

I disagree, but not in the technical sense. People have been talking about cookies since they were invented, so most people who’ve used a web browser know the word and have a vague sense that they’re used to store information on their computer, and are often used for tracking.

The fact is that “cookies” now has a colloquial meaning that’s different from the technical definition, and both meanings are valid.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#97

Post by jefftk »

hnbad wrote: post #77
jefftk wrote: post #17

> All I am using is some innocent localStorage and IndexedDB to persist user settings like the values of the sliders or the chosen color scheme. When you turn off cookies you're telling the browser not to let sites persist information. Otherwise, whatever goals you had in disabling cookies would just be worked around through these other technologies.

I'd argue that being able to write to and read from storage for the lifetime of the session (i.e. until you close the tab) is not "persistence" in the sense that any privacy-conscious user cares about. If anything, making these features break loudly enables sites to detect that they can't be used for persistence and allows them to find ways to circumvent that. Contrast this with cookies which are silently discarded i…

> It's not at all surprising that Google's browser would choose ...

This is how all browsers have handled it, for as long as localStorage has existed. See, for example, this Firefox discussion from 2006: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341524

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#99

Post by MereInterest »

jefftk wrote: post #71
aliqot wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> what the heck is so important that folks need to cookie that can't be just tied to the session token in the backend? Storing information on the client makes your site a lot more transparent about what it's keeping. If I have various user preferences in local storage you can tell that's what I'm doing and why, but if I just cookie you with an opaque token you have no idea what I'm tracking with that on the server.

While this can help, it needs to be done alongside network traffic analysis. If you type your name/phone number/address into (for example) a resume template, and you see that information stored in the local client, you don't know whether that information is also stored on the server.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#100

Post by jefftk »

pessimizer wrote: post #86
jefftk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what the heck is so important that folks need to cookie that can't be just tied to the session token in the backend? Storing information on the client makes your site a lot more transparent about what it's keeping. If I have various user preferences in local storage you can tell that's what I'm doing and why, but if I just cookie you with an opaque token you have no idea what I'm tracking with that on the server.

If there were a simple to examine and pick through localstorage, maybe. Of course if there were, localstorage would be intentionally obfuscated.

It's relatively straightforward. You open the console, type window.localStorage, and poke around. On the article I see:

    > window.localStorage
    Storage {dark-mode-toggle: 'light', cid: '2722...', length: 2}
Ignore the "length" (implementation detail) and you can see it's storing whether I've turned on dark mode and some id that's likely per-user. If I switch the page to dark mode I see instead:

    > window.localStorage
    Storage {dark-mode-toggle: 'dark', cid: '2722...', length: 2}
Post reply on HN