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Ask HN: Shouldn't web browsers ask us before storing cookies?

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Ask HN: Shouldn't web browsers ask us before storing cookies?

#1

Post by jakemor »

Every time we visit a GDPR compliant site, we are greeted with the all too familiar (yet far from homogeneous) popup asking us to either accept or deny the site's privacy policy and cookie behavior.

I'd like to point out how this law is hurting the web.

When the onus is on the developer to ask a user for permission, the user is forced to trust the developer. For example when a website asks me if they can store cookies in my browser, and I say no, there is no easy way of me knowing if that site is actually listening to me.

Wouldn't it be cleaner if the burden was on the browser to ask us for permission?

In iOS for example, the operating system asks you if you'd like to grant an app access to your camera... not the app itself! Imagine we had to blindly trust an app to not use our camera, without any help from Apple. Mayhem!

Instead, the EU mandates that developers ask permission. Developers place a stupid looking div filled with legal jargon on their homepage. We roll our eyes and click accept. Good actors (who respected our privacy in the first place) continue to respect our privacy. Bad actors continue to ignore it.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't web browsers ask us before storing cookies?

#2

Post by rolph »

I usually right click and select an element blocker.

There was a time wayy back when a browser would prompt user when site requests to push out a cookie [up to about mid 90's AFAIR], but that was before the web was hijacked for commercial interests.

now there are often so many cookies with the typical website that a manual dialogue would waste all your user time.

so i think thats where the decision was made to include all cookies, in one broad permission setting.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't web browsers ask us before storing cookies?

#4

Post by diminoten »

"Shouldn't" implies some kind of higher authority capable of enforcing such a feature universally across browsers, when no such authority exists.

Browsers give you all kinds of opt-out capabilities, if that's something you're interested in. The fact is, most people aren't interested.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't web browsers ask us before storing cookies?

#6

Post by tempestn »

From my perspective, a lot of the problem is that there are very legitimate uses for cookies and other types of local storage, outside of advertising and other sorts of tracking. IE remembering user preferences, knowing what messages they've seen, that kind of thing. It would be a huge hindrance to not be able to persist any kind of state between visits. The real issue in most cases are third party cookies from ads and other trackers, but in almost everyone's understanding these are all lumped together into the single category of 'cookies'.

Of course, it's not quite as simple as "first party cookies fine, third party bad", since when you're on a domain like google.com for example, a whole lot of tracking goes on with first party cookies. But still, that can be dealt with. If I were coming up with a regulation (be it enforced at the browser or site level) it would make a distinction between first party cookies on domains serving up to X users per month, first party cookies on domains serving over X users per month, and third party cookies on all domains. The first of those categories could, I think, be unregulated. Save messages and/or restrictions for the other two and I think it would go a lot further toward achieving the goals of these sorts of initiatives, while being much less of a useless annoyance.

Firefox is going in this direction somewhat with their default blocking of third party cookies, but there's nothing they can really do unilaterally to treat first party cookies on google.com differently from bobsblog.com.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't web browsers ask us before storing cookies?

#7

Post by johnchristopher »

diminoten wrote: post #4

"Shouldn't" implies some kind of higher authority capable of enforcing such a feature universally across browsers, when no such authority exists. Browsers give you all kinds of opt-out capabilities, if that's something you're interested in. The fact is, most people aren't interested.

But those opt-out capabilities are as clear-cut as most of GDPR banners.

edit: mea culpa, I somehow missed bunch of keys and there is a missing negation in my comment which should read "But those opt-out capabilities aren't as clear-cut as most of GDPR banners." I mean: the UI isn't there to opt out of affiliated adtech networks or to store the amount of details the user is willing to share.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't web browsers ask us before storing cookies?

#9

Post by penile_implants »

"Gee, Hacker News... I was wondering... Shouldn't it be, that a woman has to consent to getting raped, before she gets raped? It would make more sense to me if a man had to ask first, and then only rape a woman if she says it's okay.

I think rape whistles are counter-intuitive. Why would you sound a rape alarm, when you could have it so that no one gets raped unless they ask for it?

And sometimes, the penis is so small that the woman might not even realize she's being forcibly penetrated by a rapist!

Wouldn't it make sense to only get raped by random strangers if they ask nicely?

For example, if a nun is walking down the street, and different men are directly asking to rape all of her orifices indiscriminately, and they don't pray to Jesus to ask for permission to individually rape her mouth, ears and anus, she might unexpectedly get raped in the vagina too! Heavens to Betsy!

And then, think about how we might visit a rape dungeon, and there could be a rape gang of 50 or even 100 rapists in the rape gang... Oh, what to do, what to do?"

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