Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolvoleo | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com