Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

Post by maxerickson » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 9:21 PM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #171

potatoz2 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by roywiggins » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 9:29 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #117

pessimizer wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use…

Post by mr_toad » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 10:26 PM UTC

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…

Post by blep_ » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 10:59 PM UTC

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…

Post by draw_down » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 11:17 PM UTC