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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

#171

Post by hombre_fatal »

potatoz2 wrote: post #167
hombre_fatal wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think so, else we should change the name. Cookies are sent to the server on every request so it has tracking implications that locally caching something like dark mode preferences does not. One issue is that there’s a hysteria over cookies which muddies the water.

It’s trivial to emulate cookies with other Web APIs (storage + service worker, for one). You’re focusing on the label of the toggle and not user intent. If a website can send information about my visit 2 days ago to an upstream server, clearly my expectation of “Disable cookies” is broken.

Then it should be called disable client persistence or something more clear, imo. Cookies is already a ridiculous jargon word esp for the general public.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#172

Post by JohnFen »

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.

As a non-web developer, I remember years ago when disabling cookies meant only cookies -- then learning that there were other forms of persistent storage. It made me angry and I felt betrayed.

Calling all persistent storage "cookies" matches the popular understanding of what "cookie" means. I don't see the problem with accepting that and using the term accordingly.

It may not be technically correct, but this is a point where the technical distinction isn't important. If a user disables cookies, what the user is expecting is that persistent storage won't happen at all.

Renaming it to disabling "persistent storage" would be fine, too, except that it would be necessary to explain what "persistent storage" means.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#173

Post by idonotknowwhy »

sph wrote: post #123
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…

Pair it with "I don't care about cookies". This one clicks Accept on all cookie banners, and Cookie AutoDelete deletes them when the tab is closed. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...

This is great, thanks

P. S. If I'm using a separate Firefox container just for Amazon, they would isolate my Amazon cookie right? So then I could just whitelist it and avoid capchas?

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#174

Post by JohnFen »

SquareWheel wrote: post #149
pornel wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For regular users "Cookies" is a catch-all term for any persistent identifiers and tracking. The exact API used to persist cookie-equivalent data shouldn't matter. Excluding some tracking methods based on a technicality is a gotcha that erodes users' trust. I think the real issue here is that Google chose to throw errors instead of turning those APIs into no-ops.

>For regular users "Cookies" is a catch-all term for any persistent identifiers and tracking. Geez I hope that's not true. Cookies and localStorage serve a very different purpose. localStorage is exactly what it says: local storage. Cookies are sent to the server with every request and are quite wasteful in comparison. I would expect my browser to be accurate of its labeling in the user settings.

They have different primary purposes, but they can both be used to engage in tracking and other privacy-destroying behavior.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#175

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

javajosh wrote: post #154
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think of cookies as a mechanism to send data across the network. That mechanism can be used to simulate persistence on the client, among other things. I can't get with that definition. A server that attempts to set a cookie is very explicitly asking for state persistence on the client in the otherwise stateless HTTP protocol exchange. It literally has no other purpose.

Cookies are a way for clients (and servers) to add data to HTTP requests. It's a header, plus the expectation that the client will add this data to subsequent requests sent within a certain timeframe. Consider that a similar effect can be achieved by adding an id to every link in the body of a response. But its still just a link. In fact, before cookies this is how you associated requests with each other into a "sess…

>plus the expectation that the client will add this data to subsequent requests sent within a certain timeframe

That's the definition of "client-side state". Cookies have no purpose other than maintenance of client-side state.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6265

"This document defines the HTTP Cookie and Set-Cookie header fields. These header fields can be used by HTTP servers to store state (called cookies) at HTTP user agents, letting the servers maintain a stateful session over the mostly stateless HTTP protocol."

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#176

Post by JohnFen »

sysmuird wrote: post #131
user3939382 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 should have known my comment would only make you more aggressive. Walked into that I guess. You are right in that a huge amount of ads leverage user data at the expense of the user. The point I’m trying to make is that not all involved in the advertising technology are exploitive. We do zero ad targeting based on user data. You make a search for specific products, we take the response and shuffle the order a bit ba…

> The point I’m trying to make is that not all involved in the advertising technology are exploitive.

I don't doubt that you're being truthful here. The problem is that the vast majority of adtech is extremely exploitive, and there is no way for a user to tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys". So all adtech must be treated as hostile.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#177

Post by WorldMaker »

jooize wrote: post #164
WorldMaker wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I saw, that was indeed one of the more common complaints about Windows 8. Nobody could find printers and thought Windows 8 didn't support printers because Windows 8 merged everything to just "Devices" (and the short-lived Devices "charm" as an intended one-stop print shop/"universal Print button", RIP). It didn't help that Windows 8 tried to at the same time update the ancient Windows Printer driver model a…

Why can Microsoft seemingly not commit and stand by decisions in the way Apple does?

Many of Microsoft's early successes seemed predicated on listening to user and developer feedback.

It is simple to believe that they've taken that as a strong core principle of the company. The over-reliance on deep telemetry metrics, for instance, seems kind of a natural evolution of a company that cherishes as much feedback as it can get.

It seems reasonable to think that the immensely negative feedback on Windows 8 or the sad market response to Windows Phone sparked so many shifts in priority precisely in the way that any heavily feedback-focused (even slightly neurodivergent) person might over-react to negative feedback and try to do everything "not that" to make up for it, even if those were good ideas and the negative feedback was more concerned about execution of them rather than the ideas themselves.

I've been accused of "fanboying" Microsoft at times because I like pointing out the good parts of ideas that Microsoft has had over the years (like how the Charms bar was a good idea poorly executed) not to blow smoke up Microsoft but to remind them, as a feedback oriented company, of ways they've over-reacted to negative feedback, to wonder where they would be if they didn't just kill such good ideas at the first sign of disinterest/complaint but instead gave them room to grow/evolve. Sometimes it sounds like they need a lot more positive feedback to be a better company because all they seem to hear is the hate of some of the noisier crowds.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#178

Post by JohnFen »

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…

> We may find individual ads annoying

I actually don't really mind ads as long as the volume of them isn't too great. But I greatly mind the tracking that comes along with them.

> at least so far the dystopia hasn't arrived

I disagree. From my point of view, we reached the dystopia stage quite a while ago.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#180

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"(On a tangent, MDN is completely broken with cookies blocked, too. I was about to report this problem (because I care and love MDN), when I discovered a PR is already under way that fixes the Issue. Thanks, @bershanskiy!)"

This would imply that "MDN" is under a state of rapid flux, potentially "breaking" and then being "fixed" (or not) over short periods of time. However it appears from the edit history that most of it is actually static and has not changed since 2019 or 2020.^1

Perhaps the "completely broken" catchphrase invoked by the author refers to an issue with "cosmetics" (window dressing) not content. I use a text-only browser and have not found MDN to be either partially or completely "broken". I send an HTTP request for a file and I receive the contents of the file. For me, it works. No cookies or Javascript required.

1. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mdn/content/main/files/en-...

If I want to check browser compatibility, which can change from time to time, I can use Github or the MDN website.

For example,

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/ma...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cl...

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