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Comment by zucan | Hacker News Reader

If the customer does not respond to your requests to accept your house rules you deny them service. GDPR is quite clear that "silent agreement" does not apply.

GDPR Recital 32, sentence 3: "Silence, pre-ticked boxes or inactivity should not therefore constitute consent." https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-32/

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How silent is installing an extension that clicks "dismiss" for you? It's like that argument where you can't be bound by the EULA because you put your cat's paw on the mouse and had your cat click "I agree". Good luck with that argument.

If I install an extension that sends agrees to a website then yes, it's the same as using a cat as a proxy, because objectively the request for consent has been fulfilled without irregularities. It's even mentioned in sentence 2 of Recital 32, using technical measures to auto-consent is valid as long as it is done clearly.

However uMatrix does not send agrees; in fact, it shreds most 'requests to consent' to pieces before relaying the page to the user as a side-effect of blocking third-party cookies+scripts. So unlike the cat proxy, uMatrix will never send a (deceitful) agreement back and the website owner never gets a reply for his inquiry.

All a website owner gets from a uMatrix user is the wrench they threw into the consent acquiring procedure, and I doubt that's enough to signify consent as defined in GDPR.

GDPR Art. 4 (11) https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/

  ‘consent’ of the data subject means any freely given,
  specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data
  subject’s wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a
  clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the
  processing of personal data relating to him or her;

Its not pressing 'dismiss'

its removing the elements responsible for the banner from the DOM

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