Tell HN: Sites are bluffing with their cookie pop-ups | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Sites are bluffing with their cookie pop-ups

For the longest time I always hit "Accept all", because if I'm going to look at stuff like wikileaks etc. I use incognito mode, and I obviously wanted to use the site requesting permission, so I didn't want it to break. Just for fun I've started to always click "Reject all" or "Necessary only" or whatever the non-"Accept all" option is, and...not a single site has functioned worse in any way.

This may be old news to many, but I found it mildly amusing.

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The cookies are for showing you targeted advertising. They are not related to the functioning of the website (except the necessary cookies).

There are still sites where as soon as you visit the site a while bunch of ad tracker scripts load up. Before you even press any button

I think this is fairly commonly understood in the UK/Europe at least where they tend to mandate this rubbish. Surely the law should just state that Necessary only is the default... On some sites you have to drag 10s-100s of sliders to turn off all of the optional cookies. This is a good way of knowing a site I don't want to visit!

I'd be much happier if the rule was: necessary for functionality only, no action required. Anything else must be an active choice. I'd eliminate the "legitimate interest" category as it's so heavily abused.

In practice I have third party cookies disabled in my browser and most things still work fine - random exceptions though (the SAS airline website being a particularly annoying one).

If you care about these things consider joining noyb.eu

You can use Consent-O-Matic to auto-reject the sliders. It's not perfect, but when it works it saves time and when it doesn't you're no worse off.

Fun fact: you already can have a site that only has functional cookies without needing a cookie popup. Of course companies would really like you to accept advertising cookies, leading to the horrible state of every site now having a cookie popup.

> On some sites you have to drag 10s-100s of sliders to turn off all of the optional cookies.

ah the ole cookie tax return

UK here, if I can't reject all and firefox's reading mode doesn't work I leave the site tbh

If the sites are bluffing maybe you can too.

If the actual page content is loaded and the cookie is just a modal box slapped on top of it, right click the cookie modal box > open inspector > remove the child element of body that contains the cookie box. If cookie box disabled scrolling, select body tag at the inspector and tick off the overflow and position stylings to default.

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