Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

blog.tomayac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 231 posts

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#201

Post by user3939382 »

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…

My personal view is that most ads drive materialism and fulfillment through consumption which is evil. We also have research correlating familiarity and trust, so ads are there to brainwash you into trusting brands you have no reason to trust. If the ad business was boiled down to ads that were good for society it would be so small there’d be little conversation about it. The dark side of the ad business is what keeps everyone in it, the abusive user tracking is just the newest horrible dimension of it.

> People want ads

Says who? Sounds like rationalization from someone who works in the industry. I could be wrong.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#202

Post by throwaway58670 »

I recently read a thread about privacy here. One point was that the one best thing you can do is disable JavaScript. So I decided to try it. I installed Brave on my phone and disabled pretty much everything, including all cookies.

My thinking was, all I do is browse HN, hn.algolia, and lobsters. Those should work, right? Well lobsters works perfectly, including collapsing comments.

HN loses the ability to collapse comments. But algolia is the worst. Not only does it require JS, being an SPA, but it refuses to work until you enable cookies! My theory is that it reads the settings (popular, 24-hour) from a cookie, and plain dies if they're not there.

On another note, and to a pleasant surprise, a lot of the web works perfectly fine, and feels a lot snappier, including even google search. And many of the annoying cookie and paywall popups never appear, since they appear to be implemented in JS.

So yes, if you haven't tried it, I recommend you do. You can always whitelist sites you trust or really need to use.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#204

Post by bmn__ »

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...

Users who do not auto-delete are better served with Consent-O-Matic, this one clicks Deny on all cookie banners and forms by default, but is configurable.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/

• https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#206

Post by cyborgx7 »

yobbo wrote: post #6
josephcsible wrote: post #2

What if browsers made it so when you turned off cookies, instead of not allowing anything to be written, they instead gave each page you visited its own fresh cookie jar that was cleared when you navigated away?

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 supporter of privacy legislation like the GDPR, but this is asinine, as it needs me to trust every website I visit to actually honor my choice.

Really, the original sin of cookies is that were designed to be transparent to user. That was a mistake that promptly needs to be rectified.

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#209

Post by londons_explore »

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?

Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

#210

Post by dbbk »

ckemere wrote: post #27

I naively assumed from the headline that the author would complain about users blocking cookies. I was very pleasantly surprised to see a post written by someone who appreciates that some users will want to do this and is actively working to support delivering them a useful content experience!

As someone working on a ticketing purchase flow, this is critical... can't exactly just turn people away! I was also surprised about localstorage throwing exceptions.
Post reply on HN