People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?

I am from a generation that is familiar with banners showing dancing Flash animations from the internets of the 00s, usually some boobs and butts on the middle of the screen, and I still remember that pressing [x] or [close] could either close the banner or do it even bigger. So if the cookie banner's overlay is not hard enough, I am comfortable to read a text through the overlay, but it seems way more broken because the owners of that dancing nudes at least realized that they are disturbing people, and those in charge of the cookie banners really believe that they protect the interests of the user, so cookie banners are noticeable agressiver - nude banners never had an overlay and almost never made the content unreadable before paying attention to them.

Some websites might require you to go through the jungle of odd choices about which cookies are acceptable and which are not. It's so similar to Italian strike (aka "work-to rule"). Imagine regular people who are forced to chose between the strange and even strangier. What can they choose but "agree to everything" or look at some gray text through a gray overlay?

There are definitely people in the HN crowd who can understand the different options offered by cookie banners. I have an example of this product of thought, maybe not the best, but good enough to demonstrate what the jungle is [1], so if at least one person in the whole world uses this option - share your answers:

1. What will you do on your next visit if your browser forgets the cookie - click again, right?

2. On which websites do you use these custom cookies, maybe you know something about some special websites?

3. Do you know about some instruments like DO-NOT-TRACK but for cookie banners? Adblock or adblock-like extentions IMO miss the point of doing the conscious decision.

4. If you are such an advanced user of cookie-banners then it is natural for you to think they are somewhat useful for you - what are the advantages of this?

[1] https://www.hull.ac.uk/

>those in charge of the cookie banners really believe that they protect the interests of the user

No, they're asking for consent to track because the EU demanded it. The easiest way to avoid having a banner on your site is to... just not have an analytics package on your site. They're aggressive because they don't want their data spigot turned off - hence the work-to-rule nonsense. You should not infer any benevolence on the part of the people implementing these banners.

My personal habit is to always click whatever option denies the most amount of tracking, mostly because I can.

I have a bookmarklet to remove stickies, this gets rid of many cookie banners and signup prompts

If they appear to be antagonistically designed, I find myself using ublock origins lightning bolt out of frustrated spite.

Do you know if it is only third-party analytics being called that requires the prompt, or is setting any cookie for the website's use only requiring permission too?