Europeans spend 575M hours clicking on cookie banners a year

It was flagged

Often websites have cookies popup which covers whole screen. AdBlock is hiding it making interaction and especially scrolling the page difficult.

This. The internet has literally become unusable for me without ublock origin. If Google makes good on their threat of disabling adblockers, I'll ditch Chrome immediately. I was a lifelong Firefox user until a few years ago, when I just had to admit that Chrome was significantly better. But without ublock, any advantage it has becomes meaningless.

Unfortunately many sites don't care about your consent either way. The cookie is saved before you get to click anything so blocking the banner blocks only the annoyance unless you go further than just blocking the banner.

this helps you, but not the 450M people living in the EU.

Works for most but not all sites.

Automatically filling in the cookie popup is in my experience more reliable: https://consentomatic.au.dk/

exactly, also https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/i-dont-care-about-c... in combination; seriously, 0 time spent on "cookie" popups

Thanks for sharing this! I've always wondered why the browsers themselves can't implement this type of feature to improve the web. I assume it's some legal factor.

Thanks for sharing. By skimming through readme some stuff is still not clear to me:

- Can it be used for rejecting consent and not just consenting to everything?

- If so, do you maybe know what happens when it doesn't have a rule for rejecting consent on some site? It would be great if it just lets the pop-up pop up normally.

- How does it handle the "legitimate interest" checkboxes? I.e. can I make it uncheck them all on every site that provides them?

Big Tech is making the UX awful on purpose. It's nothing more than malicious compliance.

> Tracking should have been “opt in”

Tracking is “opt in”. Google and Facebook both lost and had to change their cookie dialogs.

Companies are intentionally noncompliant because it makes them money.

Tracking cookies are opt-in, that's what the pop-up tries to pressure you to do.

The idea of the legislation was that sites would prefer to trade analytics accuracy for a better user experience. Obviously that hasn't worked out.

EU already made it opt-in. This resulted in the current situation of malicious compliance. I don't think they'd ever force the way to implement it through device settings, since you may operate a device you don't own (and won't be able to change them).

Who would ever opt in from device settings if not given an incentive to do so? What would even be the point of providing such an "opt in" compared to just banning tracking entirely?

If you made tracking required in the device settings, you'd see the exact same pop-ups, they'd just give you a worse and worse user experience until you gave in and changed your device settings, or similar

> And what is the EU populace or government going to do about it?

Same thing the US populace do about being subject to food additives that are banned in the entire civilized world: not much

> I can see why big tech is dragging their ass to make the UX much better

EU's own government websites are riddled with the cookie banners.

The problem is that cookie law requires consent not just for tracking cookies, but for everything except "strictly necessary cookies".[1] This means that any cookie that stores preferences (preferred language, location for weather info, etc) requires a consent banner, as they are not considered strictly necessary. The EU law also classifies any analytics or performance cookies as not strictly necessary, meaning that if your frontend uses software like New Relic, Datadog, or Splunk, you also need a cookie banner.

1. https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

You now have a much fuller understanding of how disruptive the tracking industry is

Imagine how awesome and accessible those sites would be if they didn't feel the need to ask for massive tracking cookies. I'm in Spain at the moment and most of the government run service sites don't have this issue and the lack of such a banner warms my heart with the knowledge that my activity isn't being needlessly tracked.

I’ve lived in Australia and that was the best time of my life. Not only this, also they have water bottles with a cap that you can separate, they provide bags at the grocery store, and if you want to heat the offices to 19°C in winter, it’s allowed.

I’m told my data is protected in the EU, but of I don’t click Approve on the cookie banner, the newspaper tells me “You must either subscribe to our newsletter or approve cookies”, and the receipe website adds “We fund our cranky website full of undesired videos and where we hide our ingredient list under a “See more…” to get beyond the 3-ingredient limit, with ads, so you must allow cookies.”

If the EU could make itself useful, that would be now.

You haven't seen the non detachable bottle caps yet. The ones on yoghurt are the most annoying. But if it saves the whales I will have to accept them without spilling by beverage on EU MPs.

I still want this

It should have been designed in a way that doesn't allow such malicious compliance, but this is still an improvement

Yes, I wanted legislation that requires companies to ask for consent before abusing my personal information. I still want it.

In the same vein, I want legislation that prohibits drunk driving and I don't get upset with the number of hours it takes to administer sobriety tests.

it's ironic when you point out dupes, even though there's often an earlier comment with a link to the dupe. you don't even think to check for dupes while playing dupe police in your obsessive mania

This is a common misunderstanding. Cookie banners are not required. It is your[0] active choice to invade your website visitor's privacy which leads to this degradation of usability. Stop with the cookie nonsense and you don't need a cookie banner.

[0] Royal you, speaking to a significant fraction of the HN audience.

Cookie popups are not required, it is just how companies who were already on course of shitifying the internet decide to implement consent required by EU laws.

It's not the popup that is required, it is crappy websites that prefers to do the popups in the most annoying way to force you to accept you wouldn't want to.

Somehow we can at thanks to Europe, so that sites and app that do things well have a clear competitive advantage.

What we can be annoying is Europe not doing much to sanction abused. Like these assholes of trustarc and co that block in "processing" for 2 minutes when you refuse cookies. They pretend that it is the time to make a request to tell all the providers to not track you. But by definition if you don't want to be track there is no request they can do to tell to not keep info that they are not supposed to receive.

> They are nothing but required pop-ups

They aren't required at all, just don't use any tracking cookies. Cookies that are useful to the user generally don't require the banner, and many analytics tools now have the option to work without cookies (at the cost of not tracking repeat visitors).

Annoying your users with cookie popups is the price sites pay for using invasive tracking. The only miscalculation is that apparently everyone is fine paying that price

> where ads are occasional, but less intrusive

One out of three videos on Youtube short, several per video on Youtube, Facebook and X sponsored post are hidden within the timeline. That's not even talking about how much ads is outside those walled-gardens, for instance searching for something where SEO is heavily gamed like cooking recipes ends up returning websites where half the page is ads or sponsored content. I typed "buy pc" on Google and the first 4 results are paid ads labelled Sponsored, the first organic result is outside my screen. How are they not intrusive on walled-gardens?

Those cookie banners are not mandatory, functional mandatory cookies do not require consent.

They aren't required, though; they are a signal that the site you are visiting would rather utilize tracking cookies than provide a good UX. They could simply not use tracking cookies and then they wouldn't need to provide a pop-up!

> You think that's bad then imagine how much GDPR compliance costs...

Yeah and wait until you know how much medical regulation cost, and food regulations, and pollution regulations. We should just allow these megacorps to do whatever the fuck they want we would make so much more money!

"well we can't possibly stop tracking everyone"

Indeed, what a shitty take in this day and age. However it raises in me a very interesting point, if privacy was default, it would increase productivity.