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Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

Techcrunch's privacy policy is just an insulting joke. It proposes to opt out of their tracking through their hundred of partners, by clicking through each, one at the time.

I wanted to share that article, I think I just wont...

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It's the latest and greatest in dark UI.

The same goes for the fake progress spinners that take ~30 seconds to 'store' your privacy settings if you want to opt out, and for some reason don't take time at all if you just accept.

'services' like oath and trustarc (TRUSTe) should be illegal.

In EU, they are. I'm still hopeful that authorities will start fining websites that use this. Someday...

There was an article on HN a while back about regulatory capture in Ireland. Apparently GPDR complaints flow through them, and they ignore (almost) all the GDPR complaints. In turn, that protects the tax haven scheme they’ve established for data centers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741976

I love that you think that Oath is a privacy settings service and not an enormous media company. These dark patterns are hurting their brand.

You're right.

So many times I had a bad privacy consent experience while seeing their logo under it. Now I automatically associate Oath with that bad experience. I guess that's why I assumed Oath to be some privacy settings service similar to Trustarc.

I refuse to use any Oath sites to the point where I block many of them in my hosts file now. Sadly means I can’t read this article. I think I’ll live.

I feel the same and now avoid techcrunch like the plague. Fortunately Hackaday published a piece on this subject too, if you still have the interest.

https://hackaday.com/2019/06/07/maker-media-ceases-operation...

Thanks!

I think sites like this should be banned on HN just like malware and spam. If you want to link to them you’d need to find an alternative, non-nasty source.

I find the visible lambasting is useful and informative. I like to see the dark patterns add the discussion on it with smart people.

I’d like to see a general ban for sites with paywalls, or that demand turning off private mode or ad blockers as well.

Maybe adding a “submit alternate version of this story” feature would fix it.

If you ban sites with paywalls and those which show ads, what’s left?

The best parts of the Internet.

Could you explain why? Is it because people will only share information worth sharing if they have to pay to do so? If so, then you deserve a [redacted].

He didn’t say ban all sites with ads, he said to ban those that deny access to ad blockers.

I think that’s a fair thing. Paywalls & denying ad blockers (which is thankfully a minority of sites for now) isn’t the entire internet and there’s plenty of other content.

Actively rejecting scum would hopefully deter other sites from doing the same.

Perhaps someone could write a browser extension to click all those boxes.

I’d like to see one that is a clearing house for tracking cookies.

It would send do not track with a random pile of tracking cookies from the pool, corrupting the profile data for any trackers that don’t honor the header.

Contract law says last speaker wins, so one could argue the trackers use of the cookie content was unauthorized, so any damages to the tracker companies’ databases are on them, not the user or the extension.

(I am not a lawyer; this scheme is probably risky)

They have the "I am not a robot" captcha before every single box. They thought about it. They engineered a solution against it. They are not even trying to hide the fact that they want to make it difficult.

That is something I really don't understand, they and a bunch of other sites seemingly implemented this thing for GDPR compliance. However it's not at all GDPR compliant if you have to opt out. If they are going to violate GDPR anyways then why bother at all?

In order to associate the GDPR in people's minds with pointless inconvenience, so as to make future regulation along the same lines less likely.

If nobody can enforce the existing regulation, what is the point of future regulation?

Install ublock origin, problem solved.

Not out of the box, but blocking all yahoo.com content does indeed get rid of it.

I have 3 layers: Privacy Badger (with some custom made work), NoScript, AdBlockPlus. I have 'maxed out' all Firefox privacy settings (battery monitoring, geolocation, 3rd party cookies, etc.). I also got some strong hosts file (https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/)

I feel pretty private :)

Also when I go to a website that it doesn't ring a bell, I spend a few seconds 'working on it' (PrivacyBadger, NoScript, ABP) so I won't have to bother again with their crap.

You may want to consider switching from ABP to uBlock Origin. There's lots of articles explaining it in detail, but essentially uBO is open source and ABP is a $50mm/yr business that allows some ads through and I think (but am not positive) have a history of data sharing.

ABP is just as open source as uBO is.

Maybe not as private as you would hope. ABP takes money from Google to bypass your adblocking at their discression.

I recommend switching from AdBlock Plus to uBlock Origin.

uBlock Origin is run by what seems to be a very principled and knowledgeable person.

(The only downside I recall from moving from ABP to UBO is if you're a blocklist developer: adding site-specific rules in a form suitable for shared blocklists is currently easier in ABP than UBO. For my current experimental data set, I have manually added over 10,000 such site-specific blocklist rules, mostly one or a few at a time, using the text editor in UBO, but I still prefer UBO to ABP overall.)

It's not in any way GDPR compliant. And they know it.

One day, someone will have the persistence to hold Oath/Techcrunch to account for it.

Unfortunately right now, that someone isn't me.

I accept them and have cookies & other persistent data deleted by some App, plugin or the browser (iCab). Works for me.

Note that accepting this also allows them to use other methods (like browser fingerprinting) to stalk you.

I'm assuming that's what they're relying on, as cookies have been severely restricted by browsers & privacy add-ons even in the past.

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