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Comment by emacdona | Hacker News Reader

OMG. The site had a popup banner to tell me that they don't have a cookie banner? What the actual f____?

Either:

- They actually decided to remove one of the most annoying things about the modern web... and replace it with something very similar to tell you that they removed it, or...

- They found some legal justification for getting me to accept their cookies for dismissing the "no cookie banner banner"

Either choice makes me think less of them.

[edit: added extra newlines so bullets showed up correctly]

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I only clicked on the link after reading your comment. Yep, what that website is doing is obnoxious. A little less obnoxious than a cookie banner, but more obnoxious than not having any banner or modal.

If you'd bothered to read the banner, it answers your question: "Zero cookies, zero trackers, zero pixels."

Then it links to a page which is even more explicit about how little they collect: https://www.infohawk.com/cookies

Oh, I had bothered to read the banner. And I clicked the link.

My point is: they did all the necessary work required (no third party tracking cookies) to NOT HAVE TO show a banner...

... and then they chose to show a banner.

Probably because they were fielding complaints from their readers.

I took down a fully static public web page that had basically no traffic and no cookies. It literally just said that a domain that I had was not associated with a popular brand name that was on a different TLD so don’t email me about it.

I got as many emails complaining there was no cookie banner as I had previously gotten about the brand. There is some brand of privacy crank out there that likes to harass people about those banners (and similar gdpr regs).

You don't understand. Creating as much friction as possible and hiding the actual content is web design best practice.

If you just show the actual content in a readable format that uses the screenspace people will get scared and think of your site as unprofessional. People are so used to these popups, modals and annoyances that interrupt, take away screen space from and cover the content that they expect them.

Ugh. I hate the modern web. Thanks for making me chuckle :-)

Laughter is the best medicine.

Looks like a marketing bit to me ("look how we care about your privacy!"). I vaguely appreciate the sentiment but they've done that in a very annoying way.

If you think that’s bad, turn on the successor to x-do-not-stab. Many sites now show three popups: “we noticed the signal”, “optionally enter email to submit request”, “you clicked OK”, when zero popups would do.

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