Block cookie banners on Firefox
support.mozilla.org
support.mozilla.org
Cookie banners were the “broken window” that led to the whole car being demolished.
Banners, modal dialogs and other kinds of "new popups" in general are a bit tougher. Usually there is some element you could remove from the DOM tree or display: none but the trouble is knowing which element!
You can provide whatever the user wants to do. Recommendations? Sure. If you want them. The required data collection is then just.... Required. It is tied to this purpose though and can't be used e.g. for ads.
But it is not OK to collect everything about the user so you can charge more for ads or to sell ("exchange") that information. Which is in 99% of cases the reason for these banners.
Either you have no data and so no information to tune your recommendations or you have data in which case you needed to request for consent
IANAL, but worked through implementations that can work without banner consent.
I don't want to imply that it is easy or anything. It's pretty annoying, especially as the purpose of that data needs to be tightly tracked. But it is totally doable.
I think popup blockers turned back the tide for a while, but businesses eventually learned how to leverage dialogs for some of the same purposes. And, over time, that's been rolled up into WordPress plugins and other easy to implement solutions for one-off site owners, which makes them even more common.
The Apple/Google duopoly on smartphones is insane.
- Companies face 30% tax, can't deploy, can't do native (Apple) or get scare walls (Google), can't form a customer relationship, get ads sold against their brands, forced to use Apple/Google tech and adopt their upgrade cycles, no VMs/runtimes/plugins, etc.
- Customers also have it bad: they're faced with planned obsolescence, no upgrades, encrypted parts ecosystem, green text FOMO. Apple/Google are owning all of payments, navigation, date/sex life, work calendars, emails, etc. etc. And they're not collecting data on us throughout all these activities?
Or what about Google practically owning web discoverability by paying everyone off?
Why don't we regulate smartphone vendors? This seems fair:
- Web is first class. Users can download apps off of it without scare walls.
- Apps can have native code, WASM, self-update, pack runtimes, etc.
- Apps can use their own auth rails, payments rails, etc.
- No limit on the types of apps. You can deploy non-Safari browsers and app stores of your own.
- Search engine providers can't buy access to every single pane of glass.
I'd argue that we should also regulate them on the basis of the power of their defaults, but we're in such a bind that I'd be fine with just the above.
Actually, I'm sugarcoating things! The EU was cracking down on Android years before even the cookies. US techies genuinely thought EU antitrust was a shakedown to get money out of Google and have conveniently forgotten things since.
It's a very new regulation, so we've yet to really see the effects.
Texts don’t get sent. Group messages don’t work. Images can’t be sent. Videos can’t be sent. You can’t send on WiFi.
It sucks.
Yes, I know that’s probably a recipe for conflicting disaster, but like a lot of these temporary breakages, after about a week the problems with CNN disappeared. And I don’t think I did anything. But, I am US based too.
Do you mean it agrees to all the tracking or declines it?
[0] https://github.com/easylist/easylist/tree/master/easylist_co...
[1] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/tree/master/An...
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This is in the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I get why companies might not want this (less cookie acceptance) but they didn't want cookies to require consent either and the EU enforced that. How come no move to require support for a protocol like this?
Browsers auto-deleting (or rather not storing) cookies doesn't do anything to address the other stuff.
The banners aren't even the real problem here, it's the surveillance of users.
We either create strong regulations with teeth and enforcement that make it prohibitively costly for companies to spy on people, or we're left with a technological game of cat and mouse where users have to protect themselves as well as they can by not trusting adversarial companies to play nice and limiting what data they make available in the first place. I'd prefer a mix of both.
They were a petulant response to EU legislation, like a little child told to clean his room who goes around stomping their feet, sighting very loudly, slamming drawers, and doing the bare minimum they think will satisfy what they were told to do (ie everything just gets shoved into closet shelves and drawers) etc.
The point of the banners are to annoy the shit out of everyone in hopes that we'll pressure elected officials to pass some legislation they write up that undoes the privacy protections.
"See? See what that legislation your silly elected officials made us do? Isn't it annoying? We told you...but we wrote up some new legislation, you should tell them to pass it."
The nice side benefit is that they're extra annoying to people who have cookies blocked entirely, or dumping cookies after each browser quit, etc.
So it's a calculated response, not a tantrum.
Now, what about our beloved leaders? They enact legislation that can't be enforced. I was able to refuse cookies or auto-delete all the cookies when closing a session, so I didn't give a fuck. Now I'm forced to deal with this nonsense. So this law is worse than useless for me, it's actively damaging.
You're not judged on your intentions, but on your results. And the worst thing is they're not going to relent.
You don’t need consent for cookies if the company collects only data it is allowed to. The banners are visible notification that they want to collect more than they need to.
> P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a... for more info."
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/02/20/2127250/microsoft-a...
https://web.archive.org/web/20120220235443/http://blogs.msdn...
It seems like cookiebanners.service.mode=1 might enable it outside of private browsing.
Kind of burying the lede there that this isn't just annoying, it's illegal.
I was really just impressed by the lengths they went to to steal consent.
We have screens capable of rendering 8K in literally billions of colors and the silicon to drive them and yet we can't spare a few pixels for some borders and shading?
> “The cookie banner blocker works by using a careful selection of websites that we've put together.”
Now, how about letting plugins rewrite HTML while it downloads, so we can regex-out EVERYTHING except actual page content?
I don't know for how long this will remain true, given the number of web developers whose talks are how to optimise fifty bajillion layers of abstraction so that they can load the JS needed for a form button click before anything else… instead of just using what's built directly into the pre-JS HTML standard.
*old man shakes fist as The Cloud*
Source: I’ve disabled JS by default for I think three years now, and hold that it generally improves the web.
My technique is to disable JS via uMatrix, but don’t enable that extension in Private Browsing windows, and so just open briefly in Private Browsing if a page that I want to see is broken. I find this a pretty decent balance for ease of use.
I don't want to reload the page with each search or action in gmail. Neither do I want to download telegram or whatsapp if they can be used as a browser tab.
It'll depend somewhat on what you use the internet for I guess, but it doesn't make the internet broken by any means. Because of the work I do I've got a ton of other things disabled too which can make it harder than it would be for most people and it still usually isn't an issue. I also keep a non-hardened browser around for cases where it really is a problem, but I rarely need it.
Whoever's bright idea that forcing an annoying banner on users was going to make any company currently employing tracking think even for a microsecond about not tracking needs to have their head examined.
Because you employ tracking you're legally obligated to make someone else's life more annoying is a brilliant piece of legislation.
You don't have to choose between those.
Revenue tracking is clearly necessary; `SUM(total) FROM orders` hardly violates the GDPR. Conversion tracking can be done in an anonymized fashion, or via things like coupon codes. Plenty of business metrics left to go on.
The EU correctly decided the balance of things was too far in the corporate direction versus the consumer direction.
Even changed browsers, deleted all cookies, and disabled my adblocker. Might it be a regional thing? My IP address is geolocated in the EU.
This would count as a functional cookie.
> performance monitoring cookies
Your web server doesn't need a cookie to tell you how long it took to process my request.
But if it was the easiest and cheapest. Their lack of basic foresight is painful and has made the web worse.
I absolutely can blame the EU, prior to these regulations these cookie banners didn't plague the web. Virtually no one's privacy has increased because these regulations but almost everyone's web experience has been made worse because of these regulations.
> If enough people do the same, the law will work as intended.
How many more years do we have to wait for this happen? This HN post exist because FireFox is having to create a brand new feature to handle this garbage on its own.
How exactly have these banners prevented that?
I hate cookie banners just like anyone else, and use addons to remove them.
But I don't think it's browsers' job to modify web content based on their discretion, even with good intentions. I especially hate it when a manually crafted list is involved (as said in the article).
I think it should be done of 3rd-party addons/rules, not the browser vendor.
> Firefox version 120 introduces the cookie banner blocker.
> Enable: By default, it's on in private windows for users in Germany.
Germany was probably chosen because Firefox's market share is fairly high there
> The cookie banner blocker is available starting from Firefox version 120, and it's automatically enabled for users in Germany browsing in Private Browsing Mode.
> ...
> Enable: By default, it's on in private windows for users in Germany.
> ...
> Why Germany and private browsing mode?
> Our initial launch in Germany and private browsing mode has specific reasons:
> - Private browsing mode displays cookie banners repeatedly, making this feature especially useful. Germany, as a part of the European Union, is a prominent market where cookie banners are noticeable due to GDPR.
> - We plan to gather insights from this launch before potentially expanding the feature to a broader audience.
I'm fairly certain the telemetry can be disabled, but it is enabled by default and it's among the top 10 most blocked addresses in my Pi-Hole.
Frankly, I'm weighing the benefits to cost ratio of just blacklisting all Mozilla domains if this gets worse.
I usually turn both off right after changing the default search engine and disabling search suggestions, when I setup a new install.
https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Dat...
I've had my share of weird issues in Chrome because they enabled an "experiment" of some kind.