I Hate Cookie Consent | Hacker News Reader

I Hate Cookie Consent

ciphercue.com

15 pointsadulion10 comments

  > I hate cookie banners.

Shows a cookie banner.

Did you know that if you don't use cookies (or other persistent tokens) for ads and tracking, you don't need to show the banner? So maybe direct your hate to website owners? And yourself.

I had the same kneejerk reaction to the title, but reading the article reveals that it's instead an investigation into how despite clicking the reject button, some advertising tags have already fired/will fire the next time the site is loaded, not honoring the user's choice. It's not yet another complaint about having to see banners.

Did you read the article? Many websites present cookie consent banners and never honour them

First, please see [1].

Second, yes, I did. The first two sentences of the article are:

  > I hate cookie banners. And I hate them even more when the sites showing them don't obey them.

Notice "And". While I agree that hating cookie banners in general was not the main topic of the article, it was an independent statement. Which I commented on.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Ple...

Cookie banners should really have been a browser preference like "allow microphone" or "allow location", at least the UI would have been the same per site, and the browser can actually enforce.

Cookie banners aren't really about cookies. They're about tracking, which can be done with or without cookies.

They are also done for performative consent. The cookie banners want you to think that you have control. They often offer an illusion of fine grained control. They argue "this can't be a browser feature because they'll get it wrong or not offer you enough toggles to find some magic compromise between our advertisers and your data".

It relates to why DoNotTrack headers failed. Everyone who claimed they would support stopped supporting it as soon as users and browsers voted with their feet that they actually wanted privacy. Performative privacy is better for the corporate bottom line than real privacy, every time.

This is why I hope more people contribute to the AdNauseum project. Trying to limit cookies and trackers is a losing game. We need to proactively add buckets of junk data for advertisers - that's the only way to get them to stop collecting so much.

https://adnauseam.io/

I do offen tracking as a consultancy service and there sometimes people don`t think about that:

1. If there is no tracking, there might not need to be a cookie consent

For some sites it does not matter. Are you doing ads? If not, just skip the tracking. Anyways 75% of the people are not accepting your cookies.

2. If you track. Get it done by a pro

Not everything in online marketing is rocket science, and tracking os neither, but it is complicated and 95% of the times done wrong. Invest a few 100 bucks and get it done properly so your ads are not running into a corner.

There are solutions though

Extensions like Consent-O-Matic offers what we should have had: browser level cookie control

Reply on news.ycombinator.com