Ask HN: Why is the Web better now that we have cookie policy popups everywhere?

12 points·ben174··6 comments

A nice side effect of the cookie policy notices is it's like cockroaches scattering upon exposure to light.

Yeah, it's not pretty to look at, but now you know they were there the whole time.

It will be when the answering to those popups can be done by API, I believe...

That's the problem with the GDPR. Excellent idea, but badly executed. Something like the DNT-Header should have been in the law, saying that the user only wants the really necessary cookies.

> Excellent idea, but badly executed.

any idea why it was badly executed ?

It's badly executed on purpose. Businesses are incentivized to have you click "accept all" so the strategy seems to be mostly just fatiguing users into doing that.

I'm not going to go set cookie preferences on every single site I visit, and especially not ones that I'm just randomly visiting and have no real intention of coming back to. On desktop it's not so bad and you can mostly ignore the banner across the bottom to read that one article/post/whatever, but on mobile it takes up a good 1/3 to 1/2 the screen and really I think that's by design - you HAVE to get rid of that to make sites usable, and the easiest way is to just click the "accept all" that's always a single click away and get on with life.

> Something like the DNT-Header should have been in the law

DNT is another bit of information that can be used to track you. It's ironic. If you enable it in your browser, then you stand out among the masses who by default, have it turned off.

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