Hacker News Reader

Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Around the time the whole cookie banner thing started, Forbes had this particular one that acted like turning off nonessential cookies was this whole convoluted process that required waiting and processing something. There'd be a progress bar stating "please wait, processing your request".

Looking at the JavaScript, it was a setTimeout() for quite a long time.

I knew exactly what kind of company Forbes was after that.

View on HN

Alright, but was it any better when for example NYT employed the 'click-to-subscribe-call-to-cancel' model? I remember that relatively well, because 13 years ago I used to trust them and was literally shocked when I had to spend 85 minutes and ~130 EUR on a 2009 international call.

what about jimmy over there ... he did this thing last year, it was so terrible you would not believe. really puts things into perspective, makes you think.

No but that is orthogonal to the discussion.

I mean it's a company that looks up to rich people, no matter how they got there. Scamming is legitimate if it makes you rich, right?

Forbes is a company that caters to "wannabee" rich people, rather than the 'real rich'.

'Real Rich' people can usually see past scams and similar bullshit.

If they couldn't, they wouldn't remain rich for long. :)

> Forbes had this particular one that acted like turning off nonessential cookies was this whole convoluted process that required waiting and processing something. There'd be a progress bar stating "please wait, processing your request".

Weather Underground, formerly an indie weather service that IIRC goes back to a telnet interface before the web existed, does something similar. A window from trustarc.com appears showing a progress meter counting up the percentage 'processed', alongside "We are processing your request, this could take up to a few minutes to process." Haha. I flipped 2 bits.

Now owned by The Weather Company (who also owns The Weather Channel), who are owned by IBM, who proudly say it uses the IBM Cloud, which apparently needs a few minutes to process this. Shameful deception of end-users.

I had used wunderground for my entire life on the Internet until I saw that. The National Weather Service is pretty good - and no dark patterns.

Every American should thank NWS (amd their equivalent state/local meteorology offices if they exists on your area) for basically doing their job.

Always entertains me that name, given the organisation that previously used it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

It’s my understanding that they mostly just regurgitate NWS data you already paid for and slap some ads on it.

Isn’t that what google AMP does as well when you block some of their garbage?

And now you also know what kind of company google is.

Glad I'm not the only one that has noticed this scam going on. I've seen a number of sites doing it. One site I saw this on you had to wait an entire minute. Guess it's time for a new set of laws...

It’s already illegal- this is the exact kind of nonsense Google and Facebook were fined for at the end of last year. Strangely the Irish data protection agency seems less enthusiastic.

The Irish state gets some sweet ad money from harbouring Google in the EU.

Edit: They also protect Facebook ...

Sometimes users find a loader reassuring that the operation is working. I can think of many instances where, as a web developer, I've been asked to implement a loader because an important process finishes too quickly. Now this is anecdotal and may not be why the publisher did it but it can see why it would be implemented.

That's fair, but it isn't just a few seconds to give the impression that something is working, it's multiple minutes of watching a percentage slooowly climb from 0% to 100%. It's obviously just a cheap trick to annoy people who turn off their spyware.

Aha, maybe I misunderstood the example initially. In this case it could be a rate limiting feature that would ensure your browser is not making an excessive amount of http requests. That said, some parallelization should happen so it could go faster. So it does sound like there was no attempt to make it good for users.

Except it only happens when you don't wanna be tracked. In case you opt-in for ALL the cookies it's instantaneous...

Turning off spyware requires zero requests. You could even say it requires a negative number of requests.

This process requires no requests, no processing, nothing at all. It's literally asking the user "do you want us to make extra requests and data processing, or not do anything at all?", so choosing the "no" option should result in nothing at all being done "behind the scenes".

No, sorry, opting out of cookies is an instantaneous thing that 1) warrants no waiting time, and 2) is something that can happen in the background while using the site.

There is absolutely zero reason to artifically force the user to wait 30 seconds other than to coerce them into enabling predatory advertising cookies, which Forbes did (does?) and they know it.

Did they use TrustArc? A number of companies use the fake progress bar they provide. Here's an HN thread about Starbucks doing it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500092 (which links to https://twitter.com/pixelscript/status/1436664488913215490 )

The name sounds awfully familiar, yeah.

What would be the logic of doing this?

You had the option to “accept everything and continue instantly” when you were waiting.

You could enable predatory advertising cookies instantly without waiting.

It is a coercive tactic to get people to accept their tracking cookies

Reply on news.ycombinator.com