Hacker News Reader

Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

Nah, this plan is outright evil. We all learned from the cookie banner madness that everybody just opts-in to everything all the time, just to make the thing go away. This proposal gives us a fake choice, because so many coordination of real life activities happen in WhatsApp in the EU that you have to opt-in to still participate in a meaningful way.

I'm not talking about sharing vacation photos with your friends, but stuff like:

- here is a link that explains how to do taxes for your nonprofit

- here is our new school logo

- this is a link to the soccer tournament schedule

and so on.

View on HN

You would think Europeans would have learned from the likes of the SS and Stasi where this stuff leads. It gives too much power to government and especially the police. It wasn’t that long ago since the SS and their ilk were putting people in ovens and nerve gas showers because they had unlimited power and you had to have your papers in order or off to prison. Why is it that Americans remember it better than the ones who suffered it (or their ancestors)

> everybody just opts-in to everything all the time, just to make the thing go away.

I actually bother to decline those things.

So, not everybody. Your statistics are off by at least one.

Usually consent is one click and decline is a lot of extra clicks, if at all available. I just consent to everything and employ a Firefox extension that clears all cookies and site data when a tab is closed.

You can also try Consent-O-Matic, a plugin that will tell cookie banners whatever you pre-define. I set it to refuse everything. Doesn't work for all sites, but most that have industry standard banner software installed work.

Do you think words all/most matter in the context of this discussion?

Irrelevant.

When someone says "everybody", they generally don't mean literally every single person, they usually mean "most people". In that light, I believe the GP's assertion is correct. Most people -- really the vast majority of people -- will just click on the default option, or whatever gets the annoying pop-up out of their way.

Is there any hard data on what you refer to as "the cookie banner madness"? Personally, I click 'refuse' on every banner that pops up. They're not all that annoying, so I'm not sure that "everybody" opts-in to "everything all the time"

Way to derail my argument. This is not about literally everybody accepting everything, but that the vast majority of people will accept the default option. This has been studied over and over. The cookie banner madness is that so many cookie options are implemented as dark patterns: consent is easy, rejection is not.

To counter your anecdote, I was doing something on my boss's computer and clicked refuse all on the google prompt. My boss was surprised and said she thought the site wouldn't work if you refused. We're software engineers.

All you need to do is sit down for a while with people who aren't in our tech bubble and watch them use their stuff. I used to do on-site tech support for people, and I have seen tons and tons of people constantly click dialog boxes without reading them or knowing what they are clicking on. They just want to dismiss them because they are annoying.

I had a person who was having a printer problem close a dialog box telling exactly what was wrong with the printer. It came up every single time they tried to print. This is not abnormal behavior.

People regularly just click on the default boxes, and you know it's true otherwise there wouldn't be so many dark patterns on the internet. Dark patterns work because people don't read what's on their screen.

They are extremely annoying in my estimation. That’s why I have 2 extensions running that automatically click opt out 95% of the time. I remember what it was like before that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com