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Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

1. Pop up demanding I make a choice about their cookies.

2. Pop up telling me my adblocker is bad and I should feel bad.

3. Pop up suggesting I join their club/newsletter/whatever.

Every. fucking. site.

The newsletter one is especially obnoxious because it’s always got a delay so it shows up when I’m actually trying to read something or do something.

Edit: Oh, yeah. 4. Pop up to remind me I should really be using their app.

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Your feedback is important, Take a survey about our site… after I just got there for the first time and haven’t even seen enough content to make any worthwhile observations about the site other than “leave me alone”

Bonus points if they never tested this in mobile so they don’t realize (don’t care?) that they completely broke the website because the ‘X’ to close the popup was rendered offscreen and they broke scrolling so you can’t get to it.

For the cookies you have the Consent-O-Matic plugin. For the rest Ublock Origin is pretty effective with the optional Annoyances lists switched on.

But Consent-O-Matic is a trap doing the wrong thing. It shouldn't be accepting everything automatically, leading to what businesses want, manufactured consent, but it should be rejecting everything. Of course that's a lot harder, because of websites engaging in illegal practices / dark patterns.

You can choose what you want it to accept. In my settings these toggles are available.

  Preferences and Functionality
  Performance and Analytics
  Information Storage and Access
  Content selection, delivery, and reporting
  Ad selection, delivery, and reporting
  Other Purposes

Of which I only allow the first

It offers that? I didn't know that, thanks for correcting me, TIL. I might consider using it then.

No this is not how it works. You can configure it how you want. In fact by default it denies everything because tracking is supposed to be opt-in.

The name consent-O-matic implies that you automatically give consent but this is not what it actually does. At least not unless you explicitly want to do that. Maybe not the best name for it.

I believe you’re thinking of “I don’t care about cookies”, which accepts everything. Consent-o-matic goes for maximum opt out by default unless you configure it otherwise (I doubt anyone does).

Unfortunately as the opt out flow is tweaked more often than the accept all flow (as cmp vendors work to minimise opt outs), this does mean it breaks more often on sites so sometimes it fails to remove the banner

Yes, that must be it. Thank you for the correction!

To be fair, the name isn't doing it any favors. "Consent-o-matic" sounds like it "automatically consents".

That's not even what I generally want either - I just want cookie dialogs suppressed, nothing accepted/rejected, and cookies all thrown out once I leave the site.

That's what I sometimes do when a consent banner/popup/whatever seems disingenious/dishonest/illegal. I use uBlock Origin element zapper, and I hope that the element doesn't have bullshit random id/class or that its position in the document doesn't change every time I load the page. However, if a website is so broken, that those things happen, maybe it is not worth for me to visit it, and if I am breaking something by trying to block their sleazy non-conforming "consent" dialog, then that's on them and I consider their site garbage and broken.

For a while I would put “f***yournewsletter@gmail.com” but then I realized no one would ever see it, and it probably just helps their click numbers.

I detest newsletter modals.

I used to go to the trouble of looking up the company's own sales contact or cxo or whatever and subscribing them to themselves, but now I just close the tab.

I remember in the early 2000s I started getting junk fax calls on my phone at least 4X a day. It got so annoying that I took time out of my day to get revenge. First, they made the mistake of sending it from the same number each time. So after some investigation, I identified the name of the company and even found the CEO's phone number. Unfortunately for them, I was an early VOIP adopter and it was relatively straightforward to set the PBX software to forward all calls from that number to the CEO's phone. The calls stopped happening within 48 hours.

I used to do that too, but now I go to my spam folder and grab the latest phishing email and use the reply-to address. I like the idea of some sales guy following up a lead with a Nigerian scammer, but sadly I’ll never see the email exchange.

Put such a sales person into the shoes of the Nigerian scammer, uh, I mean "prince" and they might just as well become the Nigerian scammer. It takes a specific kind of person to engage in the dark patterns stuff and be convinced of themselves doing nothing wrong.

In the days when running one’s own mailserver was the common case for small business websites, root@localhost was a fun one. “Why does this freaking thing keep filling its hard drive with our own newsletters?”

You forgot to sub to push.

It’s because they care about your privacy, they want you to know just how much their care, so much so they’re ready to show you popups /s.

“We care about your privacy..”

Followed by something about 1800+ companies they want to sent my data to .. :|

No, it's "We value your privacy". That's different. That means they see your privacy as having value, and they want to extract as much of that value out of it as they possibly can.

> We and the 1600 third-parties care about your privacy.

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