I often think that instead of completely blocking cookies, it would be better to accept them and then throw them away. Same with localStorage. Just store it temporarily.
"Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed"
Things not available when someone blocks all cookies
81–90 of 231 posts
Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies
#82I 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.
In what way is it more complex than it has to be? I don't work in front-end but whenever I've used localstorage for personal projects it's as simple as getting/setting a javascript object with keys & values.
It’s described in the first section of the article.
Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies
#83Just don't use Chrome if it's user hostile. Use something else that's not.
Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies
#84I 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 unfortunate. And futile anyway, because the truth is that society as a whole actually wants advertising, in all its forms. We may find individual ads annoying but we still make our purchase decisions based on those ads and use those channels to hawk our own wares.
[1] The truth is that the big ad-driven internet companies have been, on the whole, actually fairly good stewards of this stuff. People don't trust them out of principle (or, just as often, tribalism), but at least so far the dystopia hasn't arrived.
Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies
#85Just don't use Chrome if it's user hostile. Use something else that's not.
Uh... The point of the article is that Chrome is proactively honoring its promise not to store user-identifiable data, even in ways that aren't ones front end developers would normally expect.
Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
> what the heck is so important that folks need to cookie that can't be just tied to the session token in the backend? Storing information on the client makes your site a lot more transparent about what it's keeping. If I have various user preferences in local storage you can tell that's what I'm doing and why, but if I just cookie you with an opaque token you have no idea what I'm tracking with that on the server.
If there were a simple to examine and pick through localstorage, maybe. Of course if there were, localstorage would be intentionally obfuscated.
Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies
#87I 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…
That's not true -- many people think advertising as practiced is abusive in its own right.
Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies
#88I 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.
A technology which leaves the door open for exploitation will certainly be exploited by someone. In a self-governing society, people would turn their backs on the most exploitable technology; in the actual world, I just don't see that happening.
Where there is an opportunity for exploitation and humans, there will always be an exploit used. It's just how we are, how our brains are built. Until that exploit yields you no benefit socially.
Meanwhile we see just how effective targeted advertisement can be for both money and political influence.
Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies
#89I often think that instead of completely blocking cookies, it would be better to accept them and then throw them away. Same with localStorage. Just store it temporarily.
I pick between the two. Of late that responsibility has been pretty well taken care of by the Forget Me Not extension on Firefox, although I think it's endangered (like a lot of things that have to do with Firefox and its extensions.)
You can set rules with three clicks, four clicks if you want that rule to be temporary and thrown away on browser restart. You may choose between never deleting, deleting on browser close, deleting on tab close, or just throwing them away. The initial setup for default policy has a few UI issues, but the author put a lot of work into it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/forget_me_not...
Re: Things not available when someone blocks all cookies
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 never win a fight over "ads". Ever.