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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

I use a plugin called "idontcareaboutcookies" to not see them because I don't want anything requiring interaction just to read stuff anywhere

The internet used to have pop ups in the early 2000s, until popup blockers and then the Mozilla browser came. Then we had over a decade of no pop-ups. Then Europe decided to make the internet a worse place by requiring websites to put something that's essentially a pop-up (the cookie notices) on them by law. I've seen enough pop ups in the early 2000s, so no thank you to them today.

I don't understand why Europe decided to make the web a worse place like this, because it's competing with apps, and apps can violate privacy much more than websites afaik

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This is a misunderstanding of the situation.

Providers made those banners big, annoying, and full of dark patterns because they want you to agree to those cookies. They didn't have to have a bunch of check boxes right next to an "Accept All" button--this was a conscious choice by those providers. You are being targeted by malicious compliance so you dislike the thing that they want gone. This is a sucker's game, and you are falling for the okeydoke.

"Europe" didn't make the Web worse. People who won't stop tracking you because it is worth nanocents to them to do so did, and this is how they're fighting people who are trying to stop them.

Some of us don't give a shit about tracking and are forced to go through all those stupid banners. So yes, I blame the EU. There should be some HTTP header that you could set to say that you accept everything. It's opt-in so the EU bureaucrats should be OK with it.

The GDPR covers the intent and processing of the data rather than any specific technical means - it's not limited to cookies. Please see my other comment for why implementing that in-browser is not feasible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30964163

You can't blame all of today's popovers on cookie regulation, the HEY DO YOU WANT TO SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER????? crowd had them beat by years. At least the cookie banners usually only cover a small part of the bottom of the window and can be ignored if you don't want to interact with them.

If a website doesn't want to annoy you with a cookie banner, they could always opt to not use any non-essential cookies.

What I don't understand is why a food blog run by someone in Kansas has cookie consent popups. You're not in Europe. Large multinational corporations I can understand. But it seems like most websites have these popups now even though most hosting and most content generation occurs somewhere other than the EU.

There's a huge industry around this bullshit that intentionally spreads FUD and misinformation to scare website operators into purchasing their "solution" even though they may not be affected in the first place.

The cookie banners are actually illegal, and, eventually, they might go away when the law catches up with them. You've fallen for advertiser FUD.

Note that those cookie banners are required, and ever-present, in the EU since 2011 or so already (long before GDPR), so that's over a decade, what do you mean by "might go away when law catches up with them"? I'd be happy if they would go away by the way, it just seems very optimistic!

> The cookie banners are actually illegal

IANAL but the 2011 cookie law required to notify users about cookies, and banners / popups were at least at that time how websites could do that

They're probably referring to the common lack of a "reject all" in the banners that came about from the GDPR cookie law.

Completely agree, every website I visit now has an annoying cookie overlay, which requires interaction from the user. Just let me read the damn article! I don't care if you track a single visit to this website which I will never come back to.

I can protect my privacy myself if I want to, the EU is not helping at all because there are just dark patterns everywhere to make not accepting cookies difficult or inconvenient.

"This law should fail because people who want this law to fail are complying maliciously" is one of the more out-there readings of reality I have seen in some time.

Perhaps, rather than shrugging one's shoulders and saying "well, to hell with you, I've got mine," there are other things we as a functioning society can do. Like standardize how these cookie prompts must be displayed (small, inobtrusive) and standardize a set of accepted behaviors when the user ignores or closes it (reject all non-required).

People can be complying maliciously and the law can be bad at the same time. I doubt most people actually thinks the EU struck a good balancing with the current laws.

They don't just track "a single visit", they bind your surfing of this particular site to your global shadow-profile at FB or Google and then sell this data about you to companies purchasing ads (or worse). This kind of data collection of the general public is what the EU's GDPR is designed to protect, and which is why you need to ask consent from your users to track their desires like that and sell their data.

The thing about these cookies and the privacy is that those cookies are accessible by everyone. And some websites can place cross site cookies and continue tracking you in detail just because you clicked that one link on that one website.

One reason the EU did this is to bring to light the tracking habits of websites and give some power to the user. Much like Apple did with their do not track me button on IPhone. A lot of people opted to not be tracked but before just didn’t have the option or were oblivious to being tracked to begin with. And trust me being as secretive as possible for tracking is by design. It’s scary the amount of info a website can get from your browser.

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