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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Always interesting to read stories about privacy and online tracking... after being asked to accept cookies that do the following:

- Store and/or access information on a device

- Personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development

- Use precise geolocation data

- Actively scan device characteristics for identification

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A point to take from the article is that users should focus on actual technical capabilities, not "privacy policies" or similar wishful-thinking gesturing.

Whether you click on the "Accept" or "Refuse" button of a webpage's Javascript-powered cookie banner has 0 technical incidence on whether you can be tracked or not. It's like going into a store and telling the clerk "please don't look at me, and when I leave please forget I ever came here".

> It's like going into a store and telling the clerk "please don't look at me, and when I leave please forget I ever came here".

Or saying "Please don't record me, I don't give my consent". But you are already in there archives. Facial recognise so they know what you like to buy.

>It's like going into a store and telling the clerk "please don't look at me, and when I leave please forget I ever came here".

I feel these cute analogies make the mistake of equating a human seeing and remembering you (maybe even writing your name down in a notebook) with a machine doing the same thing.

There's significant qualitative differences, mainly that the machine has perfect memory and can effortlessly share and collect your information with other machines.

...and that your data passes through a series of intermediaries which have the potential to be compromised.

That only makes the point for which the analogy is used stronger though.

Putting that in banners is so stupid, the way lynx prompts the user on each cookie was way better and I wish the larger browsers did that.

Agreed. Cookie permissions should be handled on the browser side, similarly to how e.g. webcam permissions are handled. Would allow for a "don't ask me again" response that doesn't itself rely on cookies.

I'd love this, cookie banners are a plague and the ones that get through my adblocker get manually blacklisted on sight. I get the intention, but the lawmakers couldn't have got the wrong end of the stick harder if they were actively trying to in my opinion. It's like the words "alarm fatigue" never appeared in their analysis of the situation.

You realize that "wishful-thinking gesturing" is what it looks like when privacy advocates lose the political game, right? The answer is not to ignore politics, the answer is to get better at politics so we don't lose next time.

Cookies have “0 technical incidence on tracking”? What’s “incidence”? Why do advertisers like to use cookies if it does not help them?

Doesn’t that proof that the publishing industry has the integrity to let their newsrooms do what they consider important stories, without interference from the business side?

Wow. That ask is very deceptive because cookies can't even do half of the things they are blaming on the cookie. Cookies can do this:

* Store information on a device.

Cookies cannot:

* Personalize ads (they can store identifying information that can be used to personalize an ad, but something else has to actually ask your browser for the data) * Actively scan device characteristics * "Access information" Cookies don't do that. Code (Javascript in the browser usually or something on a web server) that might use data from a cookie does.

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