Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> Apple last week disclosed features in its forthcoming operating system for iPhones and iPads that will require apps to show a pop-up screen before they enable a form of tracking commonly needed to show personalized ads.

Christ almighty I don't think I can take more pop-ups.

They're just cancer. Cookies, newsletters, forced logins, individual folder permissions... how many bullshit popups do I have to deal with per day? It's just popup fatigue.

Pretty much the only popups I ever want to deal with are when apps need access to my private hardware (webcam etc.) or info (location, photos, contacts, etc.). You know, the actually important ones.

Things like cookies, tracking, etc. should be a browser- or OS-wide setting. Asking me individually for every site, for every app, is the absolute worst user experience ever. Sorry but this pattern just has to DIE.

My only hope is that the more that popups proliferate, the likelier there will be legislation against them, requiring system-wide settings instead. Kind of like legislation against unsolicited robocalls.

>Things like cookies, tracking, etc. should be a browser- or OS-wide setting. Asking me individually for every site, for every app, is the absolute worst user experience ever. Sorry but this pattern just has to DIE.

We already have that, the Do Not Track header. Advertising companies ignore it because they're not legally obliged to honor it. Reminder that these companies do not care about you or your user experience and will do anything they can to skirt the law to make an extra buck off you. And we can't rely on the competence of legislators because their answer is always more popups.

However, you do have weapons to defend yourself. My favorite is uMatrix. You can set it up to automatically block cookies from any site you don't have whitelisted. And you can make it only accept first party cookies. You can also have it block javascript, cross origin requests, frames by default. If a site doesn't work without scripts, you can easily enable them temporarily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/

> Advertising companies ignore it because they're not legally obliged to honor it.

Ironically enough, they don't ignore it. They instead just use it as another bit of entropy to differentiate you from everyone else who doesn't include the DNT header.

> And we can't rely on the competence of legislators because their answer is always more popups.

The European ePrivacy regulation was meant to make DNT legally binding and enabled by default but it has been stuck in the European Council for about 3 (?) years now due to massive pressure from publishers. It's a real shame because it would improve the situation a lot.

Most popups I've seen are either illegal under the laws they were created for (the full-screen privacy ones) or signs that you should leave the website or app (newsletter ones).

The problem is that instead of stopping their abusive behaviour, tracking companies will make whole ranges of services as hard to use as possible and point towards lawmakers when people complain about them. Their flawed business model has collapsed because privacy has finally gotten attention and they're fighting tooth and nail to keep their awful businesses afloat.

There's a perfect setting in most browsers that the popups can already use, called "do-not-track". However, they don't want to use that because it's too easy to turn it on. So instead of listening to your preference, they will show the popup regardless and follow the rules to the most annoying extent of the law.

Really, people should just stop clicking through these goddamn popups and leave the website when they encounter them. The only way to stop this madness is to take away traffic from websites with shitty practices. This includes those damn notification scripts and those auto-playing videos.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10676/ at 29:50

You can choose not to be asked by any app in the settings.

That "Limit Ad Tracking" setting is already available in iOS, just not enabled by default, and not easily discoverable. People who have already set it will not be bothered, and I suspect a number will set "Limit Ad Tracking" just to avoid the popups.

Unfortunately the ubiquitous cookie consent warnings reek of design-by-government-committe suffers greatly for it.

In theory, what could possibly be wrong with explicitly warning users that they're being tracked with a hidden piece of data stored on their machines? However, in practice this has just led to a proliferation of popups on every website on earth. I'd bet that pretty much everyone just annoyingly clicks through whatever button gets them to the content. I wonder how many could even describe what a cookie is, let alone how it affects their privacy. And at the end of a day, people are perfectly willing to give up a little bit of their privacy in exchange for all the services available for free to the general consumer on the web.

I wish that the powers that be could see that the law has not had its intended effect and has instead just led to a degraded web experience for everyone.

I’m not sure where you’re from, but as an American who thought it was bad, I couldn’t believe how much worse it was browsing from the .eu.

> I wish that the powers that be could see that the law has not had its intended effect and has instead just led to a degraded web experience for everyone.

Wether it was the intended effect or not, it has made it very clear just how scummy advertising companies are.

I wonder if there's any person on planet earth who knowingly agreed to desktop notifications from their browser and makes active use of the feature.

Yep. It enables me to receive email notifications and IM notifications.

All this happened already. I remember the Windows Vista UAC, followed by Windows 7 toned down UAC.

If you use Firefox there's an extension called "I don't care about cookies" that can help cut down on such problems. Leave enduring that sort of nonsense to the Europeans.

Agreed. We need a standard that forbid websites from making popups and setting cookies if the do not track flag is set - alternatively we need all cookies to be marked as optional or required (per the GDPR) and then browsers can handle what to do with them, including just ignoring them completely.

we don't even need a standard, that's what DNT is

we need a law enforcing the standard to have teeth. otherwise it's just yet another standard not doing anything.

Are we still pretending GDPR did more than add another layer of inconvenience to the web? Users don't care and when they do it's because they bought into the fear mongering the privacy crowd keeps perpetuating. No products of value are made by these regulations.

Heh, yeah, it's a pain in the ass. But blame Google and other greedy un-trustworthy mega-corps who data mine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com