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Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

blog.tomayac.com

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Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#211

Post by npteljes »

discardedrefuse wrote: post #157
npteljes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this with Firefox's Temporary Containers. Every manually opened tab is a new browsing session, with no cookies etc. Closed tabs' data get deleted after 15 mins. Fantastic addon, and the usage is as seamless as it gets. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

I do this too! I pair Temporary Containers with the Containerise add-on which lets me create persistent containers for a few specific sites that I want stay logged in to. This setup works well with one glaring exception... Cloudflare and their stupid boats. Using temporary containers for everything has really shone a light on just how much of the web Cloudflare is gobbling up. Cloudflare throws a captcha at me every…

I do something very similar, but with just the built-in Multi-Account Containers addon. Although its usage is not the most intuitive.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#212

Post by account42 »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #206
yobbo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And instead of requiring sites to ask "accept cookies", let it be a browser option when the site attempts to store cookies, like "OK for 10 minutes".

Exactly. The great thing about cookies is that they are a tool, completely in the hand of the user. The site gives you a piece of text and says "show this to me next time if you want me to remember you". And then the browser can choose to continue to use them or not. Such a weird choice to put the onus on the websites to ask whether to give the cookies, rather than the browser to ask whether to save them. I'm a big s…

Cookies might be in the hands of the user but tracking as a whole is not. If cookies become less reliable then there are many other ways, which is why the GDPR requires consent for any tracking not just cookies.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#213

Post by wildrhythms »

londons_explore wrote: post #209

Why does the browser pretend to have localstorage but then throw an exception when it's used? Surely it would be better to simply pretend to not support localstorage and then all sites built with feature detection would work correctly without needing to special case this?

I can see it both ways. I think there's an opportunity for the developer to identify that localStorage is unavailable at runtime, and turn off certain features in the UI as a result, or write their own wrapper layer that does the 'throw-away' behavior.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#214

Post by the_gipsy »

zerocrates wrote: post #184
the_gipsy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basic UI features shouldn't need storage. In-memory or in the URL is enough. If you put it in storage then it is actually a (cookie) session, with some sort of configuration - that's not "basic UI".

If you define "basic" as not including "this remembers how you had it set last time" then, sure. "In the URL" works for that, sort of, though not if you want it to still work for users that are just re-finding you through Google or typing in your address.

> "this remembers how you had it set last time"

That is a session.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#215

Post by account42 »

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.

You cannot realisticly prevent the website from knowing that you are using a privacy-conscious browser, which is why e.g. TOR Browser and Firefox's enhanced tracking prevention don't attempt to do that but instead only try to make all their users look the same. Trying to emultate the growing number of cookieNG technologies whithout adding more privacy leaks is a waste of time.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#216

Post by the_gipsy »

temporallobe wrote: post #193
the_gipsy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basic UI features shouldn't need storage. In-memory or in the URL is enough. If you put it in storage then it is actually a (cookie) session, with some sort of configuration - that's not "basic UI".

Sure, in-memory works until the page is refreshed. Storing data in the URL is an option, but also messy and cumbersome to manage especially with bookmarks. localStorage / sessionStorage is clean and dead simple, and it actually allows an app to be truly stateful, so it’s quite unfortunate that the trend is to avoid the “evils” of storing any kind of data on the client. What, should we go back to the days of session I…

This is nothing new: on a webapp, you may not have a session. That's all.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#217

Post by unconed »

sysmuird wrote: post #101
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.

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. :)

A completely user respecting way is no ads. Try again.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#218

Post by account42 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #177
jooize wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Telemetry is almost the opposite of user feedback as it completely disregards the human element of the user. You may be able to tell what is used often, where users drop out but you don't know why and you don't know what is important to you users. So what telemetry ends being used for more often than not is to back up the developer's own preferences by seemingly backing them up with data without actually doing so.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#219

Post by account42 »

roywiggins wrote: post #183
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's a bit late, these things have been called "supercookies" since Flash started to support persisting data outside the browser's control.

Right, if anything, we should campaign for the technical definition of "Cookies" to encompass everything as well and just call the old thing legacy HTTP cookies or whatever when you need to be specific.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#220

Post by account42 »

sysmuird wrote: post #101
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.

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. :)

> I’m in adtech and we manage to do ads in a completely user respecting way within the retail space.

Ads by definition try to influence the user to do things they would not have don on their own. They cannot ever be user respecting.

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