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Comment by nvm0n2 | Hacker News Reader

Alternative reading: if mechanized expression of consent is now possible, then if you send a different header "Tracking-OK: True" all the cookie consent banners should now disappear.

It could be a great thing. 99%+ of all people would quickly learn to opt in to tracking to get rid of the annoying popups.

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That's an impossible reading, tracking requires informed consent. Blanket "do whatever" consent can never be informed.

Besides, if you gave users a free choice, as intended by the law, no one would consent to it.

The DNT header already has a setting for that: "DNT: 0" (as well as '1', and 'unset')

For one reason or another, the header has been deprecated for years now.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/DN...

Why sacrifice privacy?

I have exactly zero popups / cookie banners, and I'm in France and a French citizen (and a GPDR supported). My browser and extensions rejects all requests for consent to be tracked automatically.

We can easily get Web browsers to do that for everyone (it takes about one minute to set up manually) so that everyone could have privacy while having a seamless browsing experience. This is easily doable with the current GDPR.

Now, why would you or anyone prefer to consent to tracking instead?

What browser and extensions do you recommend?

uBlock Origin has many "Annoyances" filter lists. They work really well on desktop and on Android. I pretty much forget that cookie banners exist.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/istilldontcar... works fairly well

That is just an automatic opt-in to tracking, the opposite of what was asked for.

I use consent-o-matic for this purpose: https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic

You can actually configure each toggle yourself.

I've used that in the past. Unfortunately, it had some issues; some sites completely broke when consent-o-matic did its thing (e.g. page remained greyed-out and/or scrolling was broken from the cookie popup). Not their fault really and I respect the effort, but it made it hard to keep it enabled all the time.

Maybe I should try it out again, it has been a while...

https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies works much better, in my experience.

https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies does reject non-technical cookies – as much as it can – but https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete will do the rest.

Hmm, that is an interesting combination. I forgot that I had tried that in the past as well. It had its own issues, because it deletes all cookies by default. Is there any way to keep the convenience of staying logged in with that, e.g. a crowd-sourced whitelist for authentication cookies?

Firefox with strict Enhanced Tracking Protection.

uBlock Origin with all available filter lists enabled (except the one for Mobile pages, if you're on dekstop).

https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies to reject all tracking consent requests.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... for subdomains you want to log into but still want to access the main and other domains without being connected. For instance, I have it set always open mail.google.com in the Work container so that I can log into Gmail but still search google.com, navigate google.com/maps (etc) outside the work account.

Then, install https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete and set it to delete all data from all domains expect the ones you want to stay logged into (Google for instance… but only inside the Work container mentioned above). Then, all websites data (including cookies) will be auto-deleted a few seconds after your close all tabs from that domain. You have to enable the auto-cleaning and support for containers.

You can tweak a few more things but that should be enough.

I also recommend the awesome https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea... add-on but only for users who support some media financially. It's fine to workaround paywalls (such a bad system) but good journalists still needs to be paid somehow.

Idem with https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock

As for mobile, I use the excellent https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/ on Android. You can have the above add-ons there too, but you need to use Collections for that (as explained here: https://www.androidpolice.com/install-add-on-extension-mozil...). But this won't be necessary soon https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/08/10/prepare-your-fire...

By the way, Firefox will soon get rid off all cookies banner without the need for "I still don't care about cookies" add-on: https://alternativeto.net/news/2023/6/firefox-115-beta-relea...

By modifying the site that way you're violating its ToS and can simply be denied service, as you are neither accepting or denying the request (you can't deny it because you haven't read it).

Yeah you can claim otherwise and other people are free to just deny you service. EU still doesn't have access to Threads, right? Twitter is thinking of turning off the EU as well. That attitude is why. Trade is a two way street and constantly harassing the providers is a good way to find yourself without any services to harass anymore.

Consent is not a request where the consumer has to make a decision to accept or deny, in EU consent is an opt-in activity.

So there is a clear default state - doing nothing is the same thing as refusing a request, and refusing to even read any requests is a perfectly legitimate way of doing nothing. There is no legal or moral reason to afford the request any attention or consideration, if you're ignoring it, then you're not opting in, and the site has very clear explicit information that it doesn't have your consent.

Or to apt out.

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