Hacker News Reader

Comment by alok-g | Hacker News Reader

Asking genuinely as I never experimented myself -- Does the Internet experience in general cripple if one rejects the cookies on all websites? Or there is very little loss of functionality? I often allow 'essential cookies'. Would go to 'reject all' if that works fine.

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For years my own practice on sites that impose cookie pop-ups has been:

- Zap that element (uBo element zapper or custom CSS style rule via Stylus).

- Globally deny ALL cookies for that site, via uMatrix.

Note that uMatrix (and AFAIU Fireox) already block all third party cookies. This just makes that prejudice global to the site itself.

The number of sites for which I require some level of state preservation is parlous few. Hacker News itself is most of them, my Fediverse home the other.

(I largely don't use the Internet for commerce. That's always struck me as a bad idea, getting worse. If I cared ... another very small number of exceptions would deal with that.)

I reject-all as often as possible and they just make me log in more.

Generally, no. Despite the claims that "this will not cause you to see less ads", sometimes it even does cause you to see less ads as ad slots are less likely to fill if they have less user info. (Sometimes the opposite happens and you get the shittiest weight loss ads however). That said, I assume most people likely to use this extension already run an ad blocker.

Sometimes it breaks youtube/twitter embeds.

Not really. You might need to login everytime, or on shops you will lose your cart.

Storing login tokens and cart information falls under "legitimate interest", which does not need consent. They just aren't allowed to use that information to do anything else with it.

I've rejected all optional cookies/tracking for many years and I've never noticed any missing functionality.

Given that the average person visits a site once. No.

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