This might be just EU thing, but is there an effective way to deal with endless “accept/reject cookies” dialogues?
Regardless of the politics behind, I think we can all agree that current state of practice around these dialogues is …just awful.
Basically every site seems to use some sort of common middleware to create the actual dialogue and it’s rare case when they are actually useful and user friendly — or at least not trying to “get you”. At least for me, this leads to being more likely to look for “reject all” or even leave, even if my actual general preference is not that. I’ve just seen too many of them where clicking anything but “accept all” will lead to some sort of visual punishment.
Moreover, the fact that the dialogues are often once per domain, and by definition per-device and per-browser, they are just … darn … everywhere, all the frickin’ time.
Question: What strategy have you developed over time to deal with these annoying flies? Just “accept all” muscle memory? Plugins? Using just one site (lemmy.world, obviously) and nothing else? Something better?
Bonus, question (technical take): is there a perspective that this could be dealt on browser technical level? To me it smells like the kind of problem that could be solved in a similar way like language – ie. via HTTP headers that come from browser preferences.
The annoyances filters in uBlock Origin take care of these, I believe there are a few filters specifically for this exact issue, named appropriately.
what… I’ve had uBlock Origin enabled all the time, just never went to settings… :-D
Where exactly did you find that setting?
Click the uBlock icon > click the gear in the bottom right > click the second tab called “filter lists” > extend “annoyances” category > pick “adguard - cookie notices”
What a top-tier tip. I’m one of those people who have uBlock Origin but never knew about this. Thank you!
Do you know if there is a difference between AdGuard and EasyList lists? or if any of the two are more trustworthy?
Honestly I just enabled all of them on the grounds that blocking too many things is probably preferable to not blocking enough.
Thank you so much!
Thanks for this…I just did it…what exactly does it do?
deleted by creator
Do you know how it handles the actual cookies? Does it auto accept/reject or just block the site from making cookies?
It simply hides them, equivalent to just not doing anything. It would be illegal in the EU if the site tracked users in this case, but U block can also block trackers, so even if they tried it wouldn’t work.
There’s CookieAutoDelete (or anonymous tabs, containers, …) for the other side of this issue.
Yup, I have mine setup to autodelete cookies from tabs I’ve closed after 15 seconds. I just “accept all” cookies and don’t worry about it.
Had no idea this existed. Thanks!
Firefox has addons on mobile, e.g. uBlock origin.
Is there a way to get it on mobile?
Firefox has addons on mobile, e.g. uBlock origin.
Firefox has addons on mobile, e.g. uBlock origin.
Friendly reminder that consent popups that don’t have a clear “reject” option right next to the “accept” button are a violation of GDPR. You can report these to your country’s data/privacy governmental body - for example Datatilsynet in Norway/Denmark, CNIL in France. You don’t have to do it for every website that you go to, obviously, but if you do it even once you’re helping solve this problem for more users than just yourself.
Others have given you some good technical solutions - personally I use the uBlock Origin + annoyance filters enabled approach, and use Firefox on Android to get the same experience there.
Consent-o-matic on laptop. Usually I’ll go through the options and be annoyed. Sometimes I can’t be bothered and hit accept all.
On mobile Opera blocks them ok.
This is the way. It’s developed by some people from a Danish university and it’s really trying to navigate the shitty popups and find that decline button. Best add-on I have next to ublock.
Came here to suggest this. Consent-o-Matic seems to be a good tool for dealing with these popups.
You can install uBlock Origin, the imho best ad blocker under the sun, and activate both the “EasyList Annoyances Cookie Notices” and the “AdGuard Annoyances Cookie Notices” lists. https://ublockorigin.com uBlock is available for all the most common platforms Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and there’s a manual install, too.
Consent-o-matic seems to work about 80% of the time. I run the Firefox plugin at home and the Safari extension on my phone.
Does it deny-o-matic?
I think the desktop version lets you configure more fine grained preferences, but yes it’s designed to deny by default.
noScript with blocking all Scripts by default. Most sites rely on javascript to ask you the cookie question. Of course that will disable all other javascript functionality which i have to enable manually if I need it.
Most sites rely on JavaScript for everything
You’d be surprised how many sites are still functional enough without JS. Even then, you can often keep a lot of the tracking sites blocked and only whitelist the essentials.
Honestly my opinion comes from my professional experience as a web developer. I only use react and every website I’ve ever created requires JavaScript.
This. While react is entirely js, plenty enough have js somewhere for something. Manually whitelisting stuff is a widely unnecessary burden.
Yeah, pretty much ever web framework in the past 2 decades is JS or TS.
Yes but I prefer blocking everything unless whitelisted. It is not convenient, i’m used to it though. And since most sites rely on third party sites for consent management I can use the sites java script functions if I want to by whitelisting. Note that I operate that way because of security and privacy concerns and as an act of protest and not to go around consent pop up that’s just a nice side effect.
I pair it with AdNauseum and have my browser “click” on every ad it sees. I don’t know if those are being filtered on the other end or not, but I like to think that I’m making the advertisers pay for clicks they aren’t really getting and messing with their metrics.
If there were a way to be sure that this is not tied to my identity, I’d be all over wasting their money as much as possible.
I’ve tried the no JavaScript experience for a couple of months, but honestly it breaks to much of the internet for it to be a solution for most people. For me personally it was a worse experience than just having it fully enabled.
I don’t care about cookies
Noooo way, they got bought out by Avast
Someone forked the last version from before it was bought. I think it’s called “I still don’t care about cookies”
Fuck, why oh why does all the good stuff get bought by bad business? Damn profit greedy bastards.
🤦
It’s the name of a firefox addon that gets rid of then
from the plugin description
In most cases, it just blocks or hides cookie related pop-ups. When it’s needed for the website to work properly, it will automatically accept the cookie policy for you (sometimes it will accept all and sometimes only necessary cookie categories, depending on what’s easier to do). It doesn’t delete cookies.
…not sure about that. In my heart of hearts, I always want to help out fellow developers with the performance/diag data. I guess I also almost always want “functionality”.
The only thing I never want (and that “preference” is often worth leaving the site entirely if it’s not easy to express that) is the marketing/social scam. So I’d prefer the plugin to choose this for me.
I understand it’s not technically easy to do so, unless there is some standardized way – at which point we probably would not need plugin for that.
I’ve been dabbling with duckduckgo recently. there’s a function in the browser settings to allow only what’s necessary for the site.
I open ‘settings’ or ‘show more’ and disable all I can on most aitea, as that’s usually enough. Some sites ar such a nousanse I either avoid them or just open a private window, accept all, read what I want to read and close the window, thus wiping all cookies.
I installed Hush (for Apple devices). Totally even forgot about cookie prompts
If I have to click: ‘deny’ a gazillion times, then I just leave. If they have the alternative: ‘deny all’, then it’s OK.
I have a strict 2-click rule. If I’m not able to disagree to all cookies with two clicks I’m leaving the site again
2 clicks or 10 seconds, whichever comes first.
Couldn’t agree more. I absolutely hate the half-assed job the EU did on this. Who the hell thought we’d want to get harassed on every site we visit?
The EU did its job correctly by forcing sites to ask for consent. How that rule is implemented is up to the sites, and they often choose to do it in the most annoying possible way. And then tell you to blame the EU for it.
Also as a website owner, you only need to ask for consent when you use more than “strictly necessary” cookies (https://gdpr.eu/cookies/), i.e. cookies that are needed for your site to function normally.
The ruling has been updated to say that accepting cannot be more convenient/streamlined/less clicks than rejecting, though.
Getting that enforced is another matter altogether, however.
I just learned about the Do Not Track standard, which seems like a much better solution. Just tell your browser once that you don’t want to be tracked, and websites are required to respect that. Rather than each website implementing its own banner UI.
Unfortunately even when it’s built into your browser, some sites get around it. It’s definitely a much better idea than the half-assed mess though.
I blame the EU for not forcing implementation of Do Not Track standards. I will forever maintain that scraping of personal data of any kind should be opt-in, not opt-out. These people get paid a lot of money to get this right.
It is opt-in though? The site can’t track you until you agree with its cookies policy
My take: there’s many more user preferences (and always have been), that have effect on accessibility, usability and privacy. Cookie usage is just one of them, others are language, geolocation, dark/light theming, etc.
Judging from user perspective, level of implementation of these preferences has historically been a holy mess. For example, for one of the oldest preferences, Language, sites would commonly just take them as nice-to-have, if not ignore it completely. Geolocation is a different story, it looks like the way things are set up, site just has to ask your browser for help so it’s harder to ignore it. Dark/light theming—I don’t actually know where we are but is seems it’s slowly getting better.
Technically, I don’t see why data usage consent (cookies or not) could not be just another item in this list—in theory there must be better ways to deal with it than adding HTML dialogs.
I don’t know if there’s some standardization process going on somewhere, but it looks like we need it. These things take massive amount of collaboration, which just won’t happen until the Mozilla’s and Google’s of the world are “forced” to.
So I appreciate government bodies stepping into this in terms of simply mandating that (but not how) service providers must respect user preferences. Telling them how to do it on a technical level is another question and I can’t imagine anyone, let alone average regulatory body do this right on the first attempt.
I appreciate governments stepping in when it’s clearly needed but these people get paid a lot of money to get this stuff right. I see no good reason they couldn’t have implemented Do Not Track as the standard. Invasion of privacy should be opt-in, never opt-out, let alone some tedious task where you have to manually tick every box along the way.
Most browsers have some amount of settings for forcing sites to request permissions like geolocation anyway so there’s little reason to have a borderline EULA to go through before someone can access a website. As for dark/light mode, the implementation on the web of dark modes is so all over the place that I - like many others - just use an extension to force it. It’s not native, it’s not perfect but it’s better than nothing and better than some official attempts.
Who the hell thought we’d want to get harassed on every site we visit?
The sites’ operators.
The GDPR does not mandate cookie banners. The GDPR mandates informed consent to processing of your data beyond what is technically necessary to facilitate the service. If all you’re doing is store session ids, user preferences or whatever, you need no cookie banner whatsoever.
Lemmy also uses cookies. Do you see a banner? Me neither.Menial banners to “convince”/trick users into accepting severe privacy intrusions (cookies are the least of your concerns here) are an invention of the websites. Most of them aren’t even legal as they often do opt-out (straight up against what is written in the law) or use dark patterns to trick users into giving consent (obviously not actual consent).
It’s taking a while but the law is slowly being enforced now. Expect slightly less terrible cookie banners in the future. Whenever you do see one though, blame the site operators and law enforcement, not the GDPR.
I don’t have a helpful answer, I’m just commenting so I can find out if anyone else does…
That’s not how this works. Save the post if you want to return to it later. You will not be notified of new answers in this thread if you comment.
