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Comment by kire456 | Hacker News Reader

> Please just let me opt out of this cookie consent idiocy.

This addon [1] will let you do just that. You can configure it to tell all sites to slurp as much of your data as they want, if that's what you prefer.

> How are we making anything better with all these cookie consent pop ups?

"We" are giving people back control over what happens with information about them. This is widely considered a good idea, though perhaps not near you ;) The pop-up part can be automated by software if you prefer a one-size-fits-all configuration, as described above.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

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> "We" are giving people back control over what happens with information about them.

No. We are training people to click on every button and consent to anything that they are presented.

I don't click every consent banner and you also shouldn't. You'd be surprised how many accept a No just fine, which is the intended use.

> I don't click every consent banner and you also shouldn't.

And the regulation isn't for tech-savvy power users, it's for the general population. And they do click every consent banner.

Windows Vista's UAC modal was a good example of this.

Even the most tech-savvy HNer was clicking through those without any thought and soon turned auto-consent on (aka disabled UAC).

Add-ons like those should scare you because they give a small third party free access to every web site you visit.

With auto updates, you can't even verify that it isn't doing anything unwanted just once.

It could easily make sense to the developer to one day sell to someone who wants to do bad things which is commonly what happens with these.

I wish this wasn't true because add-ons like these are powerful and required for the modern web.

> Add-ons like those should scare you because they give a small third party free access to every web site you visit.

I think that they should scare you because they're, not surreptitiously but by design, consenting to innumerable requests to share your data without your interaction; but I guess to each their own scariness.

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