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Comment by djhworld | Hacker News Reader

This is amusing and on point, kudos to the creator!

The biggest takeaway from this is the dark patterns sites aggressively use to trick you into accepting all their cookies, by making use of creative language that might take a while to parse for the impatient reader or setting buttons to common colours that might confuse someone into clicking.

I really wish there was just a setting in the browser that just says

- Accept 'functional/mandatory' cookies (with exclusion support for sites that abuse this...)

- Reject advertising cookies

- Reject personalisation cookies

- Reject analytics cookies

- Reject tracking cookies

etc. and this config is available for these GDPR banners to query and apply the appropriate settings.

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I'm just using uBlockO as such a solution—with the hope that vast majority of problematic ‘third parties’ are already in the blocklists, at a given time.

I am not sure much trickery is needed having witnessed the speed at which some friends just click right past the warnings. Training Gerbils could not be easier.

people want their fix and they want it now and many are just apathetic to the idea of privacy on the net to the point we need a better solution.

I think it's less apathy and more that they don't understand the stakes. It's a lot like how laws in the US were written when data collection and processing was a manual task.

Sure, I could tail someone for two weeks, flash their email and SMS data, and flip through publicly available images of them. Or I can get a bunch of digital data points like GPS, wireless APs, and the actual emails and SMS data. Computers and databases make it trivial to sift through this data.

The average person likely doesn't understand how deep digital profiles can go. They think that because they use incognito to look up birthday gifts and porn, everything that's private stays private. What about when screen sharing a work presentation and there's a banner ad for cancer or addiction treatment? What about months of funeral care ads after searching for what to do after a parent or child dies?

People think that advertisers are wasting money since they see ads for the same purchase made a week prior. They'd be devastated if health insurance providers partnered with Visa or a tracking network to extract a "health risk" profile.

A DNT header should really be all that's needed .. but never seemed to gain traction.

The DNT header got abused and sent by default, which gave companies the excuse that it wasn’t actually conveying a user selection, thus wasn’t reflective of their actual choice to avoid tracking. So it goes.

It got sent by default, but I think calling that an abuse is stretching it. Do not track by default is what is meant to happen. That's what opt-in means.

Let's not create more bits for fingerprinting.

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