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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather be actively hostile to the ads and tracking and use Ad Nauseum, instead of passively blocking them with just UbO

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> actively hostile to the ads and tracking and use Ad Nauseum

Don't do this, it doesn't work the way you think, but in fact makes your browser easier to fingerprint. Very few people use that extension.

But then you also wouldn’t have been using this extension which defaulted to allowing all possible tracking when it couldn’t figure the popup out.

This was an extension for people who don’t care about privacy.

I have (had, soon) this add-on and I very much care a out privacy. Blocking all cookies from non-whitelisted sites is more or less impossible with all the consent pop ups. Ant many of those pop ups make it really hard to reject cookies.

So I went for a solution that makes browsing less annoying, whithout storing many cookies:

- Have this add on accept all cookies - Block third party cookies - Delete cookies from websites as soon as I close a tab

I (and you) don't know if many users of this add on do something similar, but it is what's recommended on the website

> Please educate yourself about cookie related privacy issues and ways to protect yourself and your data. For example, you can block 3rd party cookies, install ad blocking extensions and then block tracking tools, delete browsing data regularly, enable Tracking Protection in your browser etc.

You got lied to. The popups are rarely about cookies, and mainly about tracking. The GDPR barely even mentions cookies for a reason. With this addon, you say "Hey, use whatever method you’d like to track me in whatever way you want". But then you delete the browser cookies. I mean, that’s nice, but that doesn’t remove your tracking consent freely given.

I know that that's what GDPR is supposed to be about, but it's not what the fast majority of the pop-ups are about. Most pop-ups I've encountered are explicitly about cookies, not about any other kind of tracking.

And besides that, I think it's really naive to assume you've got any influence on tracking that sites do on their site. With cookies I know I can choose to save them on my machine or not. If a website uses the fingerprint of my computer to identify me, they'll almost certainly keep doing that after I've rejected their cookies.

You can already see it with Google Ads. Some ads don’t get delivered if you don’t allow "create a profile on me". Now, if you think companies will ignore even explicit laws every time instead of finding loopholes, then yes, it’s useless. But at least for some part of it, it’s easily provable that they don’t.

Consent-o-matic is the extension that people use that do care about tracking (or believe that most companies will mostly follow the law, I guess).

Yeah, Consent-o-matic is what I've started to use after today's news. Didn't know it existed until a couple of hours ago. I'm just not convinced it'll be a huge improvement over using (pre Avast) I don't care about cookies. And I still think that saying "This was an extension for people who don’t care about privacy" is a pretty big overgeneralization.

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