Tell HN: If I see an “accept cookies” on a website, I close it immediately | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: If I see an “accept cookies” on a website, I close it immediately

45 pointsbehnamoh38 comments

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m fed up with the state of the web today. Unfortunately, the law passed by the EU makes most websites show a banner about their cookie policy, sometimes taking up half the real estate on mobile screen. Sometimes they let you change your “cookie preferences” but often times the “essential” cookies radio button is grayed out.

So now I have decided to close any non-essential website that does this crap. For example, there was an article on HN today that linked to fleksy.com which showed a huge cookie banner on my phone. Between learning about how swipe key works (the content on their website) and saving myself from having to tap on small buttons to close the banner, I chose the latter.

I think if more people did that, websites would be forced to avoid using cookies in such a way that necessitates a cookie prompt.

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Nowadays I just keep reading, if possible without clicking anything. Sometimes all I can get is 200 pixels of vertical reading space, but heck, fuck your cookies.

Sometimes I can’t scroll and just close the site

If you can't scroll, you can usually permanently block the overlay with either uBlock origin or ad guard, depending on your browser. Reload the page - cookie banner will never appear again, overlay will never appear again, website is vanilla and functional without ever consenting to anything.

Of course having to do this is hostile, but at least it's permanent.

Stop using those sites. You send the wrong message.

It may surprise you to hear that they set cookies (perhaps only for the 'essential' ones) before you grant consent. Check the dev tools of your browser next time you get one of those banners and see what's already lurking.

Usually, these banners can be bypassed by using reader-view.

If the website doesn't support reader-view, it's hostile trash anyway in 99% of the time. And if the website does support reader-view, not using it is insane anyway. So using reader view essentially solves that problem.

That being said: since most powerusers bypass the warnings anyway through various means (like browser-extensions, content-filters etc.), the only consequence of your silent protest will be that you don't have access to that one website. Normal users don't even register the banners anymore, they just click the first button that makes the banner disappear.

Use Firefox Focus ... especially on mobile. Open such a website in Focus, just accept cookies and the hit the trash button to delete it all. Many sites are just trying to be compliant to law and it wouldn't matter to them if you trash their cookies. For those nefarious ones that store unnecessary cookies, don't give them room and just trash it all.

For desktop, the plugin “I don’t care about cookies” might help. Maybe someone knows of a mobile offering.

1. Why is this flagged suddenly? HN seems a little flag-happy at times

2. ... anyway, solution which works for me quite well, if main browser does this shit start emacs, M-x eww RET and yank in your copied URL. This gets rid of a lot of crud.

When you make a reply that gets flagged right away, rather than down voted, it is usually the person you replied to, who can only flag to express dismay. The down vote button is not available. Those most obsessed use external services to help themselves be notified of replies.

Argh, no, I meant the article itself <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978283>.

On mobile, I usually exit the site if a cookie banner pops up. On desktop, I'll try disabling javascript. If that doesn't work, I'll try reader mode. If those don't work, I exit the site.

My personal opinion is that the web had a "sweet spot" somewhere between the advent of pop-up blockers, and the death of flash (aka, the widespread adoption of javascript).

When flash was around, all the focus-grabbing/context-switching/interactive media was locked behind a click-to-play flash container that could easily be ignored.

Now that flash has been replaced with javascript (along with an expectation that everyone should allow it to run because "flash bad, javascript good"), we get unblockable pop-ups, cookie banners, unresponsive pages with content that refuses to load with the rest of the page, and countless other "features" that seem to be, at best, lateral moves.

I usually go to reject-all immediately (actually being able to reject-all some sites takes some practice, you may end up hooking some quick javascript in the devtools to reject each buttons when they don't give you a reject-all button, *SIGH*), unless I am especially disinterested in the page's contents (why I end up here? maybe a misleading search result leading to a crappy, SEO optimized page), in which case I close it too.

Its very disappointing to see what was probably a worthwile initiative end up in laws that produce this and do little to nothing to address the original concerns.

At least it _should_ give you a change to click that "X" before being tracked, but that is doubtful too, and the fact that the web has become (yet) more annoying as a result isn't.

Reader mode is often effective in evading accept cookie pop-ups, as well as other unnecessary and user-hostile intrusions like Sign up to our newsletter pop-ups.

>sometimes taking up half the real estate on mobile screen

On my Iphone SE the banner frequently fill the whole screen and it's difficult to click consent or reject and even worse sometimes it is even impossible to click on any of those consent or reject buttons.

I use Firefox Temporary Containers addon (needs Multi-Account Containers) and the Containerize addon.

I've got it set up so that sites not on an allowlist open in temporary containers. When the tab is closed, the container (and thus all cookies, local storage, etc) gets deleted 5 minutes later.

Sites on an allowlist get opened in persistent containers.

So I can always allow (at least some) cookies: if the site is on the allowlist I'll take the time to select the ones I want to allow, since they'll actually be persistent, but for every other site I can "allow all" and know they'll get deleted soon after I close the tab.

I'm a Firefox user. When I see a cookie popup I immediately CTRL+R to switch to Reader view. It usually works; I still get to read the page, but without the popup or any advertising.

I usually accept without thinking about it, assuming something somewhere on the site might break if I don't, and it won't be worth my time to figure it out.

When I do take the time to think about it, it's generally in the form of being angry at that EU law, for training people the world over to click on prompts without thinking, and reducing the effectiveness of any other prompt for things that are more important.

Because it is the laws fault that websites utilize dark patterns so that people consent to being tracked... These websites don't have to share your data with advertisers you know?

They kinda do have to share data with advertisers, some things might be very hard to do otherwise and they would have to become paid services inaccessible to the non-rich.

The law could be changed/fully enforced to stop dark patterns(And the training effect), but we don't currently have replacements for all the things that would no doubt shut down if they actually stopped tracking.

If they want to actually stop the spying without disrupting the whole tech sector, they could be giving grants for people starting new FOSS donation-supported sites like Wikipedia and protonmail.

At present I get the impression the law is written with the idea that it's better to have no access to a certain service than to have a nonprivate service. If that keeps up we might not even have Tile trackers and doorbell cameras at all someday, because they might be just straight up banned.

I'd say a habit of clicking stuff without looking is far more dangerous than any amount of spyware, because tracking cookies don't steal credit cards and such, and I'm pretty sure most people consider ransomware worse than tracking.

Plus, it holds up the entire tech industry. If you can't trust users not to click every permission prompt, then a lot of features become impossible.

@dang Can I know why this post got flagged? I'm really curious as to which community guidelines were violated.

right how are the website operators going to figure out that it is the cookie banners causing people to opt out?

Hmm, I guess they would have to notice a big upswing in this behavior and then in deciding to test things say let's A/B test cookie warnings. Of course in order to test it they would have to turn off setting cookies because setting cookies and not displaying the warning would be illegal. So they would have to do some significant programming in order to test this, in a lot of cases.

But it seems unlikely that even if many people started following your example that the site operators would ever consider this was possibly the cause.

Perhaps if you developed an extension that when you clicked it would find some contact info on site, close the site, send info to site contact that behnamoh closed the tab at this time because of being met with cookie warning.

These prompts only control Set-Cookie, right? Maybe a simple browser extension could give a quick setting for “revert cookies when I navigate from this page” so you can accept the prompt without worrying about it.

(Edit: Or a shortcut to convert the current tab to a private browsing one.)

I reject and go on. It’s just as quick as switching to reader mode or similar workarounds.

If the site still doesn’t have a quick reject button (or a close X in the corner ) then I’ll consider who I’m giving this permission and if the content can be found elsewhere, I’m off.

How is it that websites are not required to provide in these popups a top-level "only essential cookies" button of a minimum required size? Is that considered overreach? Too granular for legislation?

I think the legislation wasn’t specific enough. This really should’ve been an API.

As I understand it the regulations are actually quite well written, and expressly forbid making it artificially difficult to decline cookies, but enforcement is so rare that websites feel little need to comply properly.

If I survive the cookie banner, I'm usually blasted with "subscribe to our email" popup half way through reading, then I definitely bail. When the EU collapses maybe we can redesign the web.

Not just you. I either close unknown sites behind cookie wall or use the browser Reader mode. BTW, there is a new rule (EU?) which requires a clear "Reject all" button.

If you disable Javascript, you wouldn't see most of those cookie banners. + the added side benefit of not seeing ads (without the need for an adblocker)

AdGuard -> Filters -> Annoyances -> toggle them on progressively until the site you're visiting stops nagging.

Essential cookies is greyed out because you can’t provide an option to store cookies about storing cookies.

so why did this get flagged anyway?

really need a tool that whitelists cookie sites so any that i dont want to keep cookies for it will delete when i close the site.

Then you would close 99.99% EU sites

yea EU has really ruined the web by unleashing this crap all over the internet. Would these morons go back and reassess if it really achieved the intended outcome? I don't think so. It should be a crime to have damaged web is such way but no one will pay any price for it. We'll have to tolerate this for eternity.

This topic comes up often here in HN and its always people suggesting reader-views/extensions and such to circumvent this nuisance. Which is entirely besides the point. I don't want to install some shady extensions, cure is worse than the disease.

The dark pattern websites damaged the web, EU just made it public.

Oh please!! everyone just clicks 'accept' blindly . What exactly did this achieve?

It motivates people to install ad blockers.

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