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”
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.
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?
I don’t get why this is even needed. AFAIK the user can set sites that are not allowed to set cookies in the browser settings in chrome and Firefox at least. In theory this should work even better and more reliable than those damn popups.
They can but that doesn’t get rid of the banners, or worse the plague that is screen overlays.
I was talking about the way the law was made. Why does it require every site to implement a function that the browser already has and does better. They could have made it a requirement for browsers to inform the user about his possibility to block cookies from certain domains on the first launch, just like they made Microsoft to inform about other available browsers after the first startup of Windows XP (I think it was XP…).
But there is something even better coming I heard - there will be the possibility to have a ‘trusted external service’ handle the cookie opt-in-and-out for the users. WHY?! It looks like these laws are made by people without any kind of understanding how any of this even works…
The dialogues are not primarily about cookie consent but consent handling personal data. With that in mind, my primary concern is not giving that consent unnecessarily. I’m not interested in any personalized tracking when they could do enough usage statistic without consent and without sharing personal data with other parties. (That’s why I won’t use browser extensions that simply accept everything with the primary purpose of the consent dialogs not showing up.)
Consent-O-Matic is a browser extension that will decline any consent as far as possible.
It doesn’t work on every website but that’s better than auto-accepting - because I don’t want to give consent.
Sometimes, when the barrier is not too high, I use decline all or open choices and save (verifying defaults are off). Depends on what it is though; often times it’s not worth it to me to invest just to read their content. (Especially when it’s regurgitated from other sources.)
If I can’t use a website without consenting to personalized tracking I leave.
Another alternative is using alternate frontends to websites/services or the web archive.
My general view is that any service they could want to provide would be able to be served without consent requests. Ads can be served without personalized tracking (and can still be contextual to content). Visitor and usage tracking/stats can be done in a way without sharing that information to third parties and without individual user tracking. Legitimate interest and handling data to service (according to terms/contract) do not need consent. So really, there is no need for any consent.
/edit: I will be trying out ublock origin’s hiding and reading up on Firefox automatic rejection mentioned in other comments. I expect them to behave better than the Consent-O-Matic delay of it going through all settings.
Alternative for if you want to say no to the cookies:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/
Consent-o-matic is great but it does occasionally get stuck in an endless loop on particularly devious websites.
You can change a couple of settings in Firefox to deal with most (but not all) instantly.
Commenter there says
Careful, mode 2 means reject all or fall back to accept all if there is no Reject All button.
so at least with the post’s used value 2 it’s not a replacement or equivalent alternative to Consent-O-Matic.
There is an HTTP Header, called “Do Not Track”, but unfortunately, it has been broken.
The idea was that even under legislations that allow assuming users want to be tracked, this header being set by explicit user action would have been clear evidence that this assumption is wrong in this case.Unfortunately, Google and Facebook refused to comply outright and with their tracking software running on pretty much all webpages, compliance was never an option for all those webpages.
And Microsoft killed it off completely, by setting it per default in Internet Explorer. Might sound like a good thing, but it meant that the header could be there, even if that particular user actually fucking loves being tracked, which meant it was pretty much legally void.
