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They want you to install the "Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on" provided by Google itself. Which is kinda pointless on iOS.

Regarding the "you cannot view this content as EU citizen": I find it sad. I miss the old days of the web where it was a web.

>I miss the old days of the web where it was a web.

Everything is a trade-off. A partitioned culture is worse for exchange, but this is good when there is a risk of memetic infection. I suspect the best case is a softly partitioned culture, with barriers surmountable by intellectuals with the time and energy to learn a new language, and also a rational immune system and the good sense not to bring contagions home, but which remains partitioned for most people.

I cannot recall any occasion were I brought home a flu from visiting a page on the interwebs. Maybe you have a point with what you are saying, but I would not translate that to the internet.

They are trying to say we are too stupid to be allowed to freely consume the internet and need someone to protect us from misinformation.

And yet the arrogant position is to believe you know how human society works so well that you can say with confidence that obliterating a hundred thousand years of cultural isolation has no downside.

The burden of proof is on the one who wants to change things, and the burden is higher the more you want to change things. In 2023 US democracy is falling apart, we are on the brink of civil war, in part because of these effects, so I think they are worth questioning.

Things change naturally. There is no “burden of proof” unless you are making an argument to not allow things to naturally happen, whether that is to purposely change something or purposely keep it the same.

>Things change naturally

That's a statement so empty as to not even exist.

The worst attrocities and bad developments happened "naturally" too. Climate change also occured naturally (since in your use, naturally includes the acts of societies and people).

We definitely should not allow things to just "naturally happen". We should steer things towards a better future, and be able to see which "naturally ocurring" developments are good, and which are bad.

The term "natural" is basically meaningless here, and the rest of your comment implies that humans are incapable of saying "no" to change. The Amish, and Richard Stallman, are both counter-examples. We don't have to do anything, and anything that arises we don't have to accept, promote, or integrate into our lives.

We "naturally" made fluorocarbons, and then realized it was a bad idea and stopped.

The notion that free and open informational borders is an unalloyed good has risen to the level of dogma for many in SV, and I think that's a naive mistake. Making bomb making material accessible to an unhappy teenage boy is a bad idea; letting professional manipulators "flood the zone with shit" to perform a coup in a democracy is a bad idea, too, and for similar reasons. Letting it happen to satisfy a dogmatic position is a good way to let your civilization die. And a dead civ has no positions.

Alternatively, GP is suggesting these barriers are part of the “natural” change and can have their own positive effects. We can fight them if we wish, naturally, and doing so brings about a necessary balance. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that we are necessarily “doing good” in relation to the other. And we shouldn’t believe that achieving the extreme, the unbalanced, is necessarily “best”.

“Freedom-of-information fighters” are always simply fighting for a belief and a desire, not a truth. And in turn bringing balance or potentially imbalance depending on one’s assumptions regarding “Mother Nature’s Grand Evolutionary Scheme” or whatever we want to call it. Just as all fighters have been doing throughout time.

Every human decision is nature and natural.

> In 2023 US democracy is falling apart, we are on the brink of civil war,

Both of these statements are bullshit. People voted based on terrible information 50 years ago as well (a couple of TV appearances for the “informed voter”).

The political discourse is shitty again, but we aren’t anywhere near a civil war. The discourse and violence back around the Vietnam war was far worse than anything today.

The UI was optimized for Parrots.

"Reader" view on Safari (Desktop) made all the bad go away.

I set Safari to enable it by default on many, many sites now.

Does it automatically accept or decline consent or what?

It just extracts text content covered by all the pop-ups and shows it with some readable styling applied.

Reader Mode on Chrome does the same thing

Click the Reader Mode icon in the URL bar to bypass this.

I just had an idea.

I should call up my local privacy-contrarian legislators (I'm in a purple state) and ideate cookie banners as being a populist tool of the opposing party. And if that doesn't get them, as a tool for foreign powers to slow American tech startups and innovation. Bombastic take, but something you could plausibly sell.

The hope would be to get our lawmakers to put forth legislation banning the use of cookie banners and popups on US websites entirely. That's a cross-cutting solution that would force websites to immediately remedy their frontends.

If it ever came to pass, web operators would be doing a version of the "two buttons" meme wondering which jurisdiction to comply with. Hiring lawyers to determine if IP geolocation is a viable out, but how to respect EU residents abroad, etc.

https://archive.is/5EQSa

Thanks :)

I'm using uBlock origin on mobile Firefox and was able to just hide the banner with the element picker.

It doesn't really solve the problem though, since continuing to use the site is the same as accepting the cookies

Are you saying that the cookies are set before the user clicks accept?

Formula 1 website (*on iOS/iPhone) has the same issue right now once you hit customise the literally 100s of options appear but the accept/reject/save appears for a microsecond and disappears as it loads. Hitting the X doesn’t save.

I find the other archive produces more readable pages.

This one still has the banner but it's glued to the end of the page.

https://archive.ph/5EQSa

Here's a "remove sticky" bookmarklet that worked flawlessly:

    javascript:(function()%7B let i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3B for (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7B if(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed' %7C%7C getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'sticky')%7B elements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B %7D %7D %7D)()

I recommend consent-o-matic on desktop. It'll be good to see it appear on mobile, though I have my doubts that it'll appear soon since the entire ecosystem of plugins seems to have been hobbled on mobile.

Regarding EU users not being allowed on certain websites.. well, frankly, I'd rather they do that than have to deal with people who refuse to comply with a very simple legal requirement for user autonomy. It is a basic moral failure not to offer that autonomy, really.

Disable JS. Refresh. Start reading.

Thank-you. Disabling JS may help with reading many other pay- or other-walled submissions.

It really can! The flipside is you tend to lose images but I'm okay with that. Good luck with your new-found kryptonite

There's a reason stuff like that is called webshit.

Life pro tip: Disable JavaScript.

Yeah, NoScript can be kind of a pain but it's less annoying than all of the banners and popups that don't appear because it's effectively blocking them.

Also, Reader mode helps a lot.

the entire website is unbearable

shame on you Schuyler Velasco and northeastern.edu

I was able to read privacy statement without cookie banner on iOS using brave browser