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Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

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Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#111

Post by galdosdi »

salawat wrote: post #28
AlexandrB wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feature is long overdue in both Android and iOS. The amount of location data being harvested is outrageous.

This is absolutely unacceptable. No. The solution to "software authors routinely collecting more info than they should" is not "accept the behavior as irredeemable, and just normalize it". The answer is "make ot way more visible to users when it is done, snd make it harder for software authors to do/maintain." Anything else is just a tacit acknowledgement and grant of legitimacy to the behavior in question.

Just the opposite. What this would normalize is app developers no longer be able to depend on location data being accurate, which would destroy the location data sales market by turning it into a market for lemons.

What you propose, simply yelling at developers to stop requesting unneeded permissions, would have no useful effect. They won't change. And most customers won't care and will blindly click accept no matter what if they think they have to to access their game.

Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Assume that other actors in the world will respond the way they usually do, not the way you think they should. That is the way to get things done.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#113

Post by bagacrap »

hedora wrote: post #91
ajross wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"won't somebody think of the drug addicts" is a novel (to me) argument for why all ads are bad

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#114

Post by ac29 »

cbsks wrote: post #51
mcv wrote: post #41

I often think that instead of completely blocking cookies, it would be better to accept them and then throw them away. Same with localStorage. Just store it temporarily.

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...

One thing worth noting: at least when I installed it, the auto clean functionality (the bit that actually removes the cookie/etc data) is disabled by default. This means it needs configuration to actually do anything aside from manual cleaning.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#115

Post by matyasrichter »

user3939382 wrote: post #107
sysmuird wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in adtech and we manage to do ads in a completely user respecting way within the retail space. We monetize on search traffic without user data, cookies, local storage. The only browser feature we leverage are click events and img tags. Though I appreciate your frustration, your aggression is a little off target. :)

> The only browser feature we leverage are click events Do the users want their click events fed into an advertising engine? Did you ask them? If you made this opt-in, how many would say, yes, please track my clicks in order to advertise to me? Even if its anonymized/aggregated. A huge amount of advertising is enabled by tracking users against their will, exploiting the fact that many users aren't aware of what's goi…

I'm sorry if this hurts your beliefs, but in what way are aggregated and anonymized data exploitative? Every "offline" store does it. How do you expect businesses to make profits if they can't look at what drives their revenue without bothering every single customer with consent requests?

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#116

Post by whiplash451 »

cbsks wrote: post #51
mcv wrote: post #41

I often think that instead of completely blocking cookies, it would be better to accept them and then throw them away. Same with localStorage. Just store it temporarily.

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...

How robust is that against server-side storage of user data?

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#117

Post by Wowfunhappy »

pessimizer wrote: post #105
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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.

Or we could just recognize that for the general population, "cookies" are any client storage by a website, and for technical people, cookies are a subset of options for client storage by a website. The public never needs to know the technical distinction because it is both 1) Arbitrary: "cookie" could just as well have been a general term for client storage, and 2) Insignificant: Virtually nothing the public is conce…

> Insignificant: Virtually nothing the public is concerned about hinges on specifically how client data is stored, except for lawyers trying to get around cookie laws or to deceive through the text and UI of cookie consent pop-ups.

IMO, your exception is what makes the distinction significant. Defining a cookie two different ways gives companies a powerful new tool for purposefully misleading and manipulating end users.

Yes, many users are already confused. But if we actually make it acceptable to define cookies more broadly (but only when it's convenient for those in power), we're going to make the situation much worse.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#118

Post by guenthert »

masukomi wrote: post #72
aliqot wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> Aside from that, what the heck is so important that folks need to cookie that can't be just tied to the session token in the backend? literally any functionality that needs to persist state and you want to use offline and between reloads? See also Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).

You can store the state in the URL, can you not? That used to be done anyhow.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#119

Post by legitster »

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.

Came here to say this. If anything, a cookie that is not cross-domain is more innocent than localStorage.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#120

Post by yashap »

mcv wrote: post #41

I often think that instead of completely blocking cookies, it would be better to accept them and then throw them away. Same with localStorage. Just store it temporarily.

Agreed - Firefox have very legit, useable workflows for avoiding tracking while still having the web function for you. Chrome has IMO a purposefully unusable approach. It’s theatre, they give you the option, but that option breaks the web so badly that you’re not going to want to use it. Which makes sense, they’re an ad sales company, tracking is crucial to their business.
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