This might be just EU thing, but is there an effective way to deal with endless “accept/reject cookies” dialogues?
Regardless of the politics behind, I think we can all agree that current state of practice around these dialogues is …just awful.
Basically every site seems to use some sort of common middleware to create the actual dialogue and it’s rare case when they are actually useful and user friendly — or at least not trying to “get you”. At least for me, this leads to being more likely to look for “reject all” or even leave, even if my actual general preference is not that. I’ve just seen too many of them where clicking anything but “accept all” will lead to some sort of visual punishment.
Moreover, the fact that the dialogues are often once per domain, and by definition per-device and per-browser, they are just … darn … everywhere, all the frickin’ time.
Question: What strategy have you developed over time to deal with these annoying flies? Just “accept all” muscle memory? Plugins? Using just one site (lemmy.world, obviously) and nothing else? Something better?
Bonus, question (technical take): is there a perspective that this could be dealt on browser technical level? To me it smells like the kind of problem that could be solved in a similar way like language – ie. via HTTP headers that come from browser preferences.
The annoyances filters in uBlock Origin take care of these, I believe there are a few filters specifically for this exact issue, named appropriately.
Do you know how it handles the actual cookies? Does it auto accept/reject or just block the site from making cookies?
It simply hides them, equivalent to just not doing anything. It would be illegal in the EU if the site tracked users in this case, but U block can also block trackers, so even if they tried it wouldn’t work.
There’s CookieAutoDelete (or anonymous tabs, containers, …) for the other side of this issue.
Yup, I have mine setup to autodelete cookies from tabs I’ve closed after 15 seconds. I just “accept all” cookies and don’t worry about it.
what… I’ve had uBlock Origin enabled all the time, just never went to settings… :-D
Where exactly did you find that setting?
Click the uBlock icon > click the gear in the bottom right > click the second tab called “filter lists” > extend “annoyances” category > pick “adguard - cookie notices”
What a top-tier tip. I’m one of those people who have uBlock Origin but never knew about this. Thank you!
Thanks for this…I just did it…what exactly does it do?
Do you know if there is a difference between AdGuard and EasyList lists? or if any of the two are more trustworthy?
Honestly I just enabled all of them on the grounds that blocking too many things is probably preferable to not blocking enough.
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Thank you so much!
Had no idea this existed. Thanks!
Is there a way to get it on mobile?
Firefox has addons on mobile, e.g. uBlock origin.
Friendly reminder that consent popups that don’t have a clear “reject” option right next to the “accept” button are a violation of GDPR. You can report these to your country’s data/privacy governmental body - for example Datatilsynet in Norway/Denmark, CNIL in France. You don’t have to do it for every website that you go to, obviously, but if you do it even once you’re helping solve this problem for more users than just yourself.
Others have given you some good technical solutions - personally I use the uBlock Origin + annoyance filters enabled approach, and use Firefox on Android to get the same experience there.
Consent-o-matic on laptop. Usually I’ll go through the options and be annoyed. Sometimes I can’t be bothered and hit accept all.
This is the way. It’s developed by some people from a Danish university and it’s really trying to navigate the shitty popups and find that decline button. Best add-on I have next to ublock.
On mobile Opera blocks them ok.
Came here to suggest this. Consent-o-Matic seems to be a good tool for dealing with these popups.
Consent-o-matic seems to work about 80% of the time. I run the Firefox plugin at home and the Safari extension on my phone.
Does it deny-o-matic?
I think the desktop version lets you configure more fine grained preferences, but yes it’s designed to deny by default.
You can install uBlock Origin, the imho best ad blocker under the sun, and activate both the “EasyList Annoyances Cookie Notices” and the “AdGuard Annoyances Cookie Notices” lists. https://ublockorigin.com uBlock is available for all the most common platforms Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and there’s a manual install, too.
If I have to click: ‘deny’ a gazillion times, then I just leave. If they have the alternative: ‘deny all’, then it’s OK.
I have a strict 2-click rule. If I’m not able to disagree to all cookies with two clicks I’m leaving the site again
2 clicks or 10 seconds, whichever comes first.
noScript with blocking all Scripts by default. Most sites rely on javascript to ask you the cookie question. Of course that will disable all other javascript functionality which i have to enable manually if I need it.
Most sites rely on JavaScript for everything
You’d be surprised how many sites are still functional enough without JS. Even then, you can often keep a lot of the tracking sites blocked and only whitelist the essentials.
Honestly my opinion comes from my professional experience as a web developer. I only use react and every website I’ve ever created requires JavaScript.
Yeah, pretty much ever web framework in the past 2 decades is JS or TS.
Yes but I prefer blocking everything unless whitelisted. It is not convenient, i’m used to it though. And since most sites rely on third party sites for consent management I can use the sites java script functions if I want to by whitelisting. Note that I operate that way because of security and privacy concerns and as an act of protest and not to go around consent pop up that’s just a nice side effect.
I pair it with AdNauseum and have my browser “click” on every ad it sees. I don’t know if those are being filtered on the other end or not, but I like to think that I’m making the advertisers pay for clicks they aren’t really getting and messing with their metrics.
If there were a way to be sure that this is not tied to my identity, I’d be all over wasting their money as much as possible.
I’ve tried the no JavaScript experience for a couple of months, but honestly it breaks to much of the internet for it to be a solution for most people. For me personally it was a worse experience than just having it fully enabled.
I open ‘settings’ or ‘show more’ and disable all I can on most aitea, as that’s usually enough. Some sites ar such a nousanse I either avoid them or just open a private window, accept all, read what I want to read and close the window, thus wiping all cookies.
I don’t care about cookies
from the plugin description
In most cases, it just blocks or hides cookie related pop-ups. When it’s needed for the website to work properly, it will automatically accept the cookie policy for you (sometimes it will accept all and sometimes only necessary cookie categories, depending on what’s easier to do). It doesn’t delete cookies.
…not sure about that. In my heart of hearts, I always want to help out fellow developers with the performance/diag data. I guess I also almost always want “functionality”.
The only thing I never want (and that “preference” is often worth leaving the site entirely if it’s not easy to express that) is the marketing/social scam. So I’d prefer the plugin to choose this for me.
I understand it’s not technically easy to do so, unless there is some standardized way – at which point we probably would not need plugin for that.
Noooo way, they got bought out by Avast
Someone forked the last version from before it was bought. I think it’s called “I still don’t care about cookies”
Fuck, why oh why does all the good stuff get bought by bad business? Damn profit greedy bastards.
🤦
It’s the name of a firefox addon that gets rid of then
Duck duck go browser with auto refuse turned on. It stops tracking cookies by default. And then I burn them all anyway when I’m done.
I’ve been dabbling with duckduckgo recently. there’s a function in the browser settings to allow only what’s necessary for the site.
I installed Hush (for Apple devices). Totally even forgot about cookie prompts
There is an HTTP Header, called “Do Not Track”, but unfortunately, it has been broken.
The idea was that even under legislations that allow assuming users want to be tracked, this header being set by explicit user action would have been clear evidence that this assumption is wrong in this case.Unfortunately, Google and Facebook refused to comply outright and with their tracking software running on pretty much all webpages, compliance was never an option for all those webpages.
And Microsoft killed it off completely, by setting it per default in Internet Explorer. Might sound like a good thing, but it meant that the header could be there, even if that particular user actually fucking loves being tracked, which meant it was pretty much legally void.
Firefox has settings to automatically hit accept or to automatically hit deny or to first try to hit deny then hit accept if it didn’t work. You could end up agreeing to things you might not want to either way though (as sometimes opt out and deny are seperate things you need to do both for.)