Ask HN: Why does every website ask me to accept cookies?
It feels like every site (few exceptions) now throws up a big banner or modal demanding you “accept cookies”. The whole process impedes usage of the site.
> To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must: Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.
It's a compliance thing. It's worse if you're in the EU, but the internet is global so it affects everybody, these days.
The old uBlockOrigin (which Google depreciated) had an auto-decline, so I didn't see one of those cookie banners for years... the new Lite version, however, doesn't seem to have that feature.
If you have essential cookies that need to remember what a user saved to their shopping cart, if they want dark or light mode, their login session, do you need them to consent?
The Firefox version works just fine.
Those texts don't say anything about cookie banners, though, only that users should be informed and have the possibility to make a choice. How that information and ability to make a choice are presented to the user is left to the site owner to decide.
For site owners, cookie banners are an easy way to comply without having to DESIGN that compliance into their site, which can be interesting but time consuming and expensive.
In theory, it should be possible to prompt the user for consent before storing something on their device but that would only work for stuff site owners have control over.
In practice, "cookies" are rarely used voluntarily by the site owners themselves but they are used a lot by the crap they add to their sites for tracking and so on via tag managers. And for that there is no better solution than a blanket cookie banner.
Sites started putting the banners up in part because they didn't want to stop tracking users, and in part to make things annoying enough to users to try to get people angry about efforts to help people protect themselves.