Hacker News Reader

Comment by muffles | Hacker News Reader

As each year goes by, I get more and more annoyed by the cookie consent pop-ups.

Does U.S. law really require cookie pop-ups? And don't most websites store the cookies before consent is given anyways?

https://olivergrimsley.com/2022/03/04/please-stop-putting-co...

IMHO it’s because they can try to apply a dark pattern to have users accidentally consent to more tracking than they might normally agree to.

100%. This also bugs me: Why can’t websites set a cookie that stores whether I’ve consented to the cookie pop up? On some sites I have to keep consenting over and over (IKEA comes to mind).

Stack Exchange is downright malicious in having you click it on each subdomain.

No, I don't care that one user created the Math forum and another created the Sysadmin forum, it's all run by you Jeff, that's who I am engaging when clicking the popup, not MathFan1982

This is mostly malicious compliance - the law does not require these annoying popups, but the websites want them to a) make you dislike the law that prevents them from freely collecting your data and b) wearing you down, so you just accept instead of making the effort to go and deny the data collection. Also, at this point it's probably also a lot of cargo culting.

It's mostly ignorance now. Most people don't know the law and don't know how to comply with it. If the popup method hasn't been invalidated by a court, why spend more on time, energy, and risk doing something different?

Is there really much risk in just not tracking by default?

I think ignorance is part of it, but also, they don’t actually want to do what users want them do to, which is just not track unless the user goes looking for options that actually require tracking at a technical level.

> Is there really much risk in just not tracking by default?

Let’s see… I can’t even stop Marketing from breaking our site with Google Tag Manager.

A significant portion of our sales come from the ability to track users and email them useful product recommendations.

We do not sell customer data and try to avoid vendors who do. It’s only used internally.

Absolutely not. The people implementing know, and the people designing know. This represents intentionality.

I always assume that they'd stop asking if and only if you say yes to all -- is that not the case?

Having a pop up for only cookies is silly, but at least as often they’re used for data processing consent and that makes more sense than putting the consent form on a splash screen or in the body of the page I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com