Removing cookie consent requests from Firefox iOS
rchaves.app
rchaves.app
It is always worth pointing out that the complex dark-pattern filled forms that many sites use are there choice and not impressed by the relevant legislation.
They could just make it all opt in/out with a single click, but they know that without the trickery very few users will do opt in to being stalked so instead they try make it as difficult as possible in the hope that you agree to everything either accidentally or just because you are such of it and want the form to go away. I just back away from sites like that and in particularly egregious cases I've blocked them at the network level with a DNS blacklist: the information I'm looking for has always also been available somewhere else less irritating.
There have been some fines related to this sort of thing, and over time some of the dark patterns are getting a little less common, but enforcement thus far has not been sufficient to make the less dark variants the norm.
What it's missing is a reason for websites to comply, which is what a law could enforce.
Browsers don't have to provide uniquely identifiable information. Surveillance was a voluntary choice implemented by developers, not a necessary evil.
They did. There was the do-not-track header. Of course nobody used it. Sites don't want to make it so you can automatically opt out of cookies. The only way they'll use some standard system that allows that is if the law forces them to.
I did vaguely hear that that may happen. Presumably the bureaucrats that wrote that bit of the GDPR (apparently without consulting anyone who knew anything about the web) do use the web and they must have noticed how annoying it is.
Why law makers decided people should be warned about the websites storing data client-side with users having full control over the content and who it gets shared with, is something I will never quite understand. Though I do recognise that some of the blame lies with most user-agents storing these cookies indefinitely and sharing them without question, by default, to this day.
They are definitely being deliberately obtuse. Nothing in the relevant legislation requires anything like the party of dark patterns we see in many sites, in fact many of the consent forms are not conformant with the legislation at all anyway.
The GDPR mandates that non-functionally-essential tracking (regardless of whether it’s done via cookies or other means) should be strictly opt-in and the consent process shouldn’t annoy or trick the users into opting in. Pre-ticked checkboxes or making the opt-in button more prominent than the decline button aren’t allowed.
The problem is that up until now enforcement has been non-existent. Thankfully this seems to be changing - the Internet Advertising Bureau’s “consent” framework has recently been ruled non-compliant so hopefully there’s going to be some financial pressure (in the form of fines that everyone has been fear-mongering about) to fix this properly.
I wish that was true but the GDPR doesn't actually say that as far as I know. There's official advice to that effect, but it's not written in the law. IIRC it just says it must be a "fee choice" which is way more open to interpretation.
They did. It was called Do-Not-Track. The ad industry barely gave a care about it. Microsoft got the bright idea to make it opt-in, but they aren't iOS, so the ad industry responded by ignoring DNT entirely and that was that.
The reason why GDPR plagues the Internet with maliciously designed and legally non-compliant pop-ups everywhere is because of a small exception for "user consent" as a lawful basis for data collection. I imagine the intent was for things like opting into telemetry and error reporting[0], with the idea that if someone tried to ask for consent for ad tracking it'd be rejected.
The ad industry is vehemently opposed to opt-in consent because of two reasons:
- People don't change defaults, so making tracking opt-out means most people get tracked while making it opt-in means most people don't get tracked.
- Nobody will consciously opt-in to ad tracking, or at least they assume nobody will do so.[1]
Since GDPR more or less forces ad companies and web publishers to actually provide user-visible controls for tracking, they've generally agreed upon circumventing the spirit and letter of the law by blasting people with illegal dark patterns to create a veneer of compliance. This is something the EU will need to enforce (and is doing so).
The rest of this article is great, BTW - not a lot of people actually go through the effort of modifying FOSS on iOS to do what they want, and I think more people should. In fact, you might even be able to get this work upstreamed, assuming Apple doesn't have a problem with bundling anti-tracking tools like this into a third-party browser.
That being said, I really wish most FOSS projects on this platform had build systems friendlier to third-party builds than Xcode projects are. The whole "wipe all the team IDs and change the bundle identifier" dance is annoying, and you always have to remember not to commit those changes in Git. I really wish we could make all that information separate from Xcode so it could be properly gitignored.
[0] I generally draw a line between telemetry and ad tracking. As far as I'm concerned, using my data to improve the product I'm using is legitimate. The only concern I have there is who stores the data. Using my data to make your ad sales more lucrative is not. And I imagine if you forced users to make an educated decision they'd be more OK with the former than the latter.
[1] I have heard of people who consciously prefer relevant advertising. You could pitch it to users on that basis; however, ad tracking goes way beyond interest targeting. A huge segment of the ad industry is remarketing: selling ads to people who have recently visited another website. I've found that nontechnical users find these ads to be incredibly annoying, if not creepy, but just assume there's no way to turn them off because the option to do so is intentionally buried.
It’s definitely not affected by AdGuard (as a content blocker) it’s only affected by AdGuard as a dns Adblocker, and if you see no difference between content blocker and a dns blocker I envy you and you have a way higher tolerance for web bullshit than I do.
hard disagree
It's not Firefox's fault. It's just that Safari has system-level privileges that Firefox can't have, despite just being Safari under-the-good.
With that said, I'm not the person you replied to and wouldn't argue against someone using Firefox on iOS. The above are just my reasons for not using it, so it's understandable if those things don't matter to others.
What does it actually mean to buy something these days?
But I get the impression that for the people of North America tablet/smartphone mean iPad/iPhone.
I have no data, but it is the very strong impression I get
Or you could just download Firefox Focus and enjoy ephemeral browsing sessions where all traces can be eradicated at one touch of the little trash icon.
But for 99.9% of people it frankly achieves roughly the same goal of being able to hide from cookies with minimal effort.