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Consent-O-Matic – automatically fills ubiquitous pop-ups with your preferences

consentomatic.au.dk

11–20 of 147 posts

Re: Consent-O-Matic – automatically fills ubiquitous pop-ups with your preferences

#11
post #5

I've been using the annoyingly-named superagent for a while for the same task, but it often seems to fail to detect some of these annoying boxes. I'll definitely give this alternative a try and see if it works any better. Thank you so very, very much to the EU and whatever other government agencies are responsible for making the web more annoying to use. https://super-agent.com/

> Thank you so very, very much to the EU and whatever other government agencies are responsible for making the web more annoying to use. They didn’t make the web annoying – advertisers did. They were the ones who chose the most annoying way to comply with the laws.

Sure, for advertiser thingies. But website features like optionally storing your preferences in localStorage, or assigning device IDs to be able to understand and optimize website performance both require consent pop-ups.

Re: Consent-O-Matic – automatically fills ubiquitous pop-ups with your preferences

#12
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thank you so very, very much to the EU and whatever other government agencies are responsible for making the web more annoying to use. They didn’t make the web annoying – advertisers did. They were the ones who chose the most annoying way to comply with the laws.

Sure, for advertiser thingies. But website features like optionally storing your preferences in localStorage, or assigning device IDs to be able to understand and optimize website performance both require consent pop-ups.

Preferences and other things required for site to work do not require a consent.

Re: Consent-O-Matic – automatically fills ubiquitous pop-ups with your preferences

#13
post #10

I’d like the option to automatically choose the LEAST privacy conserving option, because 1. I don’t care 2. It should work better since it aligns with the goal of the site

The extension allows you to choose what settings you want.

Re: Consent-O-Matic – automatically fills ubiquitous pop-ups with your preferences

#14
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, for advertiser thingies. But website features like optionally storing your preferences in localStorage, or assigning device IDs to be able to understand and optimize website performance both require consent pop-ups.

Preferences and other things required for site to work do not require a consent.

Some preferences are not required for the website to work, but do improve the experience. These are classified as "functional cookies", "preference cookies", or "user interface cookies" in ePrivacy Directive and UK GDPR literature, examples like remembering your selected language, and still require consent. See https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/direct-marketing-and-pr....

Consent-o-Matic uses this text to describe this category of cookies (for me, it's the first item in extension's config UI):

> Preferences and Functionality: Allow sites to remember choices you make (such as your user name, language or the region you are located in) and provide enhanced, more personal features. For instance, these cookies can be used to remember your login details, changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of web pages that you can customize. They may also be used to provide services you have asked for such as watching a video or commenting on a blog. The information in these cookies is not used to track your browsing activity on other websites.

Re: Consent-O-Matic – automatically fills ubiquitous pop-ups with your preferences

#15
post #6
post #2

I’ve been using this for a couple years now, and absolutely love it. Thanks, team! I also love that it’s owned by the University of Aarhus, as I am more willing to trust academia with something that has a disturbing level of (client-side) access to my browsing data. I really wish the browser vendors would develop better permission models to guarantee my data can’t be exfiltrated by a malicious plugin (aka a once-good…

It is very hard to prevent exfiltration by code that is allowed to write to the DOM in today’s browsers. There is Content Security Policy (csp) which applies to the whole page and sometimes governs scripts injected by extensions but not the extensions themselves. I would love to see browsers add a chain-of-custody to scripts and DOM nodes, so it is easy to tell which nodes were added/touched by a script, and if a scr…

Add some sort of signing process and call this Secure DOM.

Re: Consent-O-Matic – automatically fills ubiquitous pop-ups with your preferences

#16
post #10

I’d like the option to automatically choose the LEAST privacy conserving option, because 1. I don’t care 2. It should work better since it aligns with the goal of the site

Regarding 2: That's the fun part! Manual consent isn't required for functional cookies, only for marketing garbage that doesn't help you at all.

Re: Consent-O-Matic – automatically fills ubiquitous pop-ups with your preferences

#17
post #10

I’d like the option to automatically choose the LEAST privacy conserving option, because 1. I don’t care 2. It should work better since it aligns with the goal of the site

That is an option with consent-o-matic. You just go to the first page of the preferences and turn everything on.

Re: Consent-O-Matic – automatically fills ubiquitous pop-ups with your preferences

#19
post #16
post #10

I’d like the option to automatically choose the LEAST privacy conserving option, because 1. I don’t care 2. It should work better since it aligns with the goal of the site

Regarding 2: That's the fun part! Manual consent isn't required for functional cookies, only for marketing garbage that doesn't help you at all.

What if the goal of the site is to monetize views so it is economically viable to produce content?

Then GP's point towards 'it should work better' implies it works over the long-term and not a single interaction.

I find ads frustrating as well, but it is a powerful monetization strategy and that doesn't have a substitute.

Re: Consent-O-Matic – automatically fills ubiquitous pop-ups with your preferences

#20
Sadly this is the wrong solution: proper solution is to create generic "get to the base information" solutions to get past all dark pattern bullshit.

Trusting advertisers, web developers under coercion, annoying paywall based sites has been proven to be a bad choice over and over in history repeating itself hellscape.

Firefox's "reader view" was the right idea, that doesn't quite go far enough. We need options like "i just want text, non ad pictures, and original videos".

Any higher layers where we allow these brutal dark patterns are too much work to track and fix every little thing they can do with code

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