Comment by ryukafalz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryukafalz | Hacker News Reader

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Article aside, a pet peeve of mine... I feel like it's often gaming sites like this one that have the most obtuse cookie banners.

> This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.

First off, assuming consent and saying it's "to improve your experience." Maybe they're not doing any targeting... nope, wait, they're loading tracking pixels. And their privacy policy says they use cookies to "...help customize our marketing offerings."

Okay, now how about opting out? Click "Read More" which takes you to... their privacy policy. Some sites at least bury information about how to disable browser cookies entirely in their privacy policy. Here even that is nowhere to be found; no mention of how you could prevent their cookies from being set in your browser at all. (Setting aside the fact that disabling cookies globally in your browser is so obviously not a sane way to avoid tracking on a single site, so even that would be woefully insufficient.)

I can only assume folks in the EU are seeing something that actually asks for consent, because this would be so far from compliance over there it's not even funny. Hoping the US gets real online privacy laws soon.

> You can opt-out if you wish.

No, practically speaking, you cannot.

Over time I got a feel for sites that do this, and as a practical matter I open those in private/incognito, then just click through. Commercial blogs, how-to sites, news, especiallyfrom the US: almost never compliant.

I do judge. It makes me a bit less receptive to Frogwares' message, that they do this on their company blog

Even here in the EU there's many mainstream sites that just have a cookiewall saying "by proceeding you agree to our use of cookies".

This is totally not ok. There's should always be a way to opt out, it's not allowed to just block the site in case people don't want to agree. This has been reaffirmed in court several times. But nothing seems to be done to enforce this.

> I can only assume folks in the EU are seeing something that actually asks for consent

Nope, same message.

You need to install DDG privacy essentials, uMatrix and uBlock Origin. Then you won't even see those banners, since they no longer load (along with any of the related tracking)

I would rather see the banners. They're a good indication of how much a company is likely to respect my privacy: no banner is best (because it means they're not tracking), a banner with an easy opt-in and a way to dismiss it is okay, and a banner that doesn't allow an opt-out I'll just leave active forever. It'll annoy me anytime I visit the site, and that's the point; I'll avoid sites that do this when I can.

One example: PayPal has a huge banner (often blocking the "pay now" button) asking for permission to use my data for targeted ads, and there's no way to dismiss it other than agreeing to it. So I leave it there forever, and every time I use PayPal I have a little bit more of a negative impression of it.

It's also good to know about them when I'm sharing links with friends - I'll be very hesitant to share one with someone who I know is using a mobile browser, because they definitely won't have the tools to avoid tracking like this.

Once you visit a site, you then open the uMatrix tab provided to decide which 3rd party scripts you will allow to run. Typically you only enable a few.

I'd much rather know about tracking this way (the list of 20 blocked scripts) than they other (they already ran, but at least the site popped up a banner)

Yeah, this is super noncompliant. See https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

The ability to opt out does not suffice to satisfy the GDPR, even if I could find how to do it.

Opened an articel on Yahoo news today. That one was a doozy.

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