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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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