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Comment by loloquwowndueo | Hacker News Reader

Someone here in HN recommended Consent-O-Matic instead of I don’t care about cookies. Said “I do t care about cookies is the extension advertisers want you to install” :) apparently it just says yes to everything. Consent-O-Matic specifically configures things to share the least amount of information possible.

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Sites work much better if you just say yes to everything. Devs never test the 'no' path as well, and half the time you'll find embedded videos/maps/tweets won't display or are buggy.

Since I care about a fast efficient web experience far more than I care about leaving digital footprints around, I choose the extension that says yes to everything.

I'm more or less in your camp. I really don't care about "saying no to cookies" because I don't believe that sites will implement no properly anyway. I'd much rather be relying on the clear (hopefully!) lines being drawn by my browser and its settings.

Asking me if I'd like to allow various cookies is by far the least important part of the problem. Relying in the cooperative efforts of site owners? Really?

This kind of defeatist attitude is exactly why we can't have nice things. The overton window is a thing. Pushing back matters.

Inaccurate

> Devs never test the 'no' path as well

It's not just that - some services are literally unrenderable without cookies! (Fewer these days at least).

Consent-O-Matic does not reject all cookies - it responds intelligently and automatically to the cookie consent dialogs and selects only essential cookies.

If someone says a cookie is non-essential and rejecting it results in their site not working that’s on them - a human might manually choose to reject it, it’d be the same end result.

Well if "no" becomes the default then I'm sure engineers would switch over to testing that path more frequently instead

Why answer the question at all? I use uBlock Origin's cosmetic filters to simply delete the prompt from the page. I nether accept nor decline, and I've never run into problems with this.

Some websites block interaction until the pop-up is dismissed

In that case I usually just leave if it's not a site I absolutely have to use

As far as I've seen, they all do this using a transparent element placed over the page.. which I filter away.

I've had no luck blocking YouTube's consent popup with uBlock Origin. From what I remember, it would randomize the element ID and also add a load delay, and if you managed to block it, it would block comments from loading or break scroll etc. With Consent-O-Matic, it works just fine.

Have you ever tried booking flights with EasyJet? Their web servers would just literally stop sending you TCP packets once they see a session cookie that hasn't accepted the cookie consent within a minute or so. Took me a while to figure this out, and until I realised it's caused by me not seeing the cookie consent modal, my workflow was to clear cookies and then try to book the flight within 60 seconds. :-D

I don't think I've ever seen a website that broke when I clicked "decline", or "disable all+save".

(Yes, I manually click or click click for every website. Also I don't think that EU "broke the internet", rather they made me painfully aware that every f.in website uses cookies and other tracking methods just to give my browsing history to ~300 total random company for no reason.)

Links for Consent-O-Matic if anyone wants to take a look:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat... (Firefox)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/consent-o-matic/md... (Chrome)

https://consentomatic.au.dk/ (Official site)

With a name like "I don't care about cookies" it does kind of make sense that it would just auto-accept everything. After all, they don't care about cookies

Better to just start using Firefox multi-account containers. An add-on like I Still Don't Care About Cookies ensures you aren't bothered by the popups, and temporary containers are wiped upon tab closure so anything those sites leave behind is automatically deleted.

Reminder that consent applies not just to cookies but to all kinds of tracking, inluding fingerprinting and server-side techniques.

I found using Firefox containers (new tabs get new empty containers, sites I use often get their own separate containers but always the same ones so I don’t have to login every time) + ublock origin means that accepting cookies doesn’t matter as much anymore. Because once I close the tab, the container is destroyed and so are the cookies, and the various ad and analytics servers were not getting data anyway because uBo was blocking them.

I just hit control-w when i see a consent dialog. It is rare that anyone is really important enough that i'd do more.

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