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Comment by skeeter2020 | Hacker News Reader

skeeter2020

Cookie banners are a bad/wrong solution to the underlying problem, but it's the dark patterns within that really piss me off. I shouldn't have to invest deep cognitive attention to "only accept mandatory" but if you're not careful many dialogs will trick you into clicking accept all after you go to the trouble to untoggle all the optional shit. The answer is to use isolation containers, aggressively reset them and not to worry about any of this.

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The underlying problem that the cookie banner operators have is there are laws preventing them from abusing the data they collect.

Annoying banners increase pressure on people to contact their representatives to overturn those laws, allowing the operators to abuse the data

I just always click accept all.

Less to think about, and it basically puts the web into the state it was in before we all got bent out of shape about tracking, which was fine.

(Now that I type that... I should have made an extension ages a go that just does "identify cookie banner and click on the left-most button automatically").

> and click on the left-most button automatically

Why do you think the left-most button is always accept all?

Why do you think the accept all button will be in the same position on all reloads of the same site?

It's more that, as an end-user, I do not care whether I click accept or reject all; my goal is to get that UX speed-bump out of my face as quickly as possible.

Maybe it'd be better to randomize which button is selected so if the plugin becomes popular site admins can't reliably guess where to put the button.

I hate how web sites can weasel their way around consent by simply declaring their cookies as "necessary" or "mandatory." As the Dude would say: Yeah, well, that's just like, your opinion, man. How about we have an easy-to-use "Reject ALL cookies from this site (and deal with whatever breaks)" option?

You're assuming maliciousness. I run a site that uses cookies (encrypted session cookie) so they can add items to a cart, because not doing so would be a horrible UI. There's also a cookie created by the payment processor, but I only load their script on checkout. There's nothing else though. I don't even use tracking / analytics.

There's zero weaseling going on. No dark patterns. I'm just too busy to build a no-cookie version that passes info in the URL or w/e (which also seems less than ideal). Your two options are to use the site or don't use the site. If there was enough pressure from real customers to provide another option then I probably would, but it wouldn't change anything. It's just busy work / checking boxes.

IMO this needs to be built into the browsers rather than being yet another tax on builders due to spammers / scammers / advertisers. If we had meta referencing each cookie where you can disclaim exactly how it will be used and whether it's optional / required, then we would have a standard without dark patterns being possible.

Session cookies don't require a banner or any kind of notification.

That's good to know (and reasonable)!

GDPR was adopted 9 years ago. It's insane to me that people still go out of their way to know nothing about it.

It's much easier to blame the cookie banner on GDPR (which are not entirely related) than read the texts and jurisprudence about it to know how it works.

Every website showing a consent screen is either willfully ignorant (rarer these days) or they want your data while saying hypocritical things like «We value your privacy»

Well I don’t live in or operate a business in the EU and none of my customers are in the EU.

I did start looking into it out of curiosity, but TBH it wasn’t obvious what I needed to do, if anything.

I doubt most Europeans know much about Canada’s data protection laws either, and it would be insane for me to expect them to.

There was the "Do Not Track" header, but I don't think any sites that actually honored it. And it is deprecated now.

On Firefox we still have webRequestBlocking, so it is quite simple to block cookies. See for example https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ximatrix/

> There was the "Do Not Track" header, but I don't think any sites that actually honored it. And it is deprecated now.

Sites used that header to fingerprint and track users.

Source?

As it wasn't widely implemented, and few people turned it on, Safari removed it in 12.1 as a potential fingerprinting variable: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...

I think I remember a larger article about this, but can't find it now

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