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Comment by vincvinc | Hacker News Reader

Is there a (firefox) extension that auto-rejects everything on your behalf?

I have only seen auto-accept ones so far.

Consent-o-Matic [1] allows you to set your preferences once. I’d say it’s had about a 50-75% success rate. Sometimes takes a second or two.

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

this one works well for me also.

I'm using both these extensions - I don't see cookie consent very often.

https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/ says it'll reject where it won't break the web site. But it's called "I don't care" not "I never want" cookies :)

The extension is quite effective, but I decided to uninstall it after it got acquired by Avast[1].

[1] https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/whats-new/acquisiti...

You can add the extension's filter list to your ad blocker for the same general effect. https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/

Just in case you're not aware, a couple of options. It's possible (though who knows for how long) to add the filter list[1] used by IDCAC directly to uBO. The extension was forked[2] prior to acquisition if that is preferable. EasyList Cookie is available as a toggleable list on uBlock Origin, which hides many consent prompts - though only visually if I'm understanding correctly, so better to combine with an autodelete extension.

[1]: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/ [2]: https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Dont-Care-About-Cookies

Websites aren’t allowed to start collecting data until the user has made an active choice. Thus, removing the DOM elements should be enough, on compliant websites. There should be no need to reject

Good luck with that one in practice.

Indeed, hence "on compliant websites". I wish the EU's enforcement wasn't so lacklustre. Would be interesting if they hired 2-3 reverse engineers and had them go down Alexa top 10k and verify that consent banners are implemented correctly, handing out fines if not. One can dream I guess.

Fundamentally, the problem with the GDPR isn't that the law is problematic, it's the lack of enforcement, this is the true cause of the consent banner proliferation.

Side note: The alexa top sites list is defunct since May: https://www.alexa.com/topsites/

EU's enforcement is based on the country the site is hosted in's regulator.

Which is a faff because it means the Irish regulator actively looking at what sites are hosted in the Ireland, rather than an EU regulator looking at all EU accessible sites. Which is non trivial to search for.

(Also the Irish regulator struggles with regulatory capture).

A sweeping, sector-wide law with extraterritoriality is fundamentally problematic.

2 or 3 people “handing out fines” to top-10k sites is extremely unlikely to deliver positive results.

EU agenda would be better served I think by going for wins, not ambitions.

it is enforced, see https://www.enforcementtracker.com And yes, there's talk amongst some of my GDPR friends about creating a bot. If they did, it would basically a money printing machine. (At least in the first month or so until companies catch up). This site can help you get it right: https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net

> it is enforced, see https://www.enforcementtracker.com

Your link basically disproves your assertion. The total amount fined across all countries and companies is still less than what the biggest offender (Google or Facebook) make in a single year.

Regarding scraping bots, Noyb (a pro-privacy non-profit) has done so and sent out automated notices to the offenders. The problem as far as I understand is that the best you can do is complain to your local DPA (which is useless), it doesn't give you the right to sue directly (nor provides a way to estimate monetary damages), so suing directly is not an option.

All the examples I looked at were about installing cameras or video surveillance. I have not looked through the full list but it certainly is not what it’s being presented to be, i.e. GDPR tracking enforcement.

If you don't trust the website to be compliant when making no selection why would you expect them to not track you after selecting no?

Indeed. There's no "more illegal" than "illegal".

uBlock origin removes all "annoyances" from the page, which should imply reject most cookies.

It tries to, and does it better than others, but nothing is 100% . consent-o-matic gets rid of a ton of these pop up consent banners and sets them to "off"

> which should imply reject most cookies

It does not, though.

In practice, you'd be using uBlock with the other lists which would block all the trackers anyway, so it would (by not loading what would set those cookies in the first place).

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