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Comment by hootz | Hacker News Reader

DO YOU CONSENT WITH OUR TRACKING COOKIES POLICY?

[YES, I DO, THE IMPORTANT TRACKING ONES] [YES, I DO, ALL OF THEM] ⁿᵒ ᵃⁿᵈ ᶜˡᵒˢᵉ ᵈᶦᶜᵏᵒᵛᵉʳ

I, like most people, always just click whatever option is larger and easier to click (or closest to my cursor at the time). It never seems to matter to my experience which I pick. Sometimes it’s the “all” option, sometimes it’s the “none” option, etc.

I feel bad about doing this, because surely someone somewhere is doing analytics on click data and saying: “See! There is a lot of variation in responses to this cookie choice, people are really taking them seriously, we should keep them!”

I’ve observed a few sites that now display two options, ‘Yes’ and ‘Reject and pay’

NOYB is working on it. I think for derstandard.at it was already declared illegally with the prices they have, but it’s still ongoing.

I like to call that a mafia tactic as the framing is normally „it would be a shame if we have to sell your personal data“.

Thanks, Europe!

Yep. Without Europe, we'd have no idea which websites were trying to sell us out to the highest bidder.

Surprise, they all are!

Europe is why you have CCPA

Well… Europe do require the accept and deny options to both be equally visible and accessible, see for example this week-old court ruling:

> Administrative Court (BVwG), thereby upholding a decision made by the Austrian Data Protection Authority in 2024. Specifically, the ORF must ensure that the buttons to ‘accept’ or ‘reject’ tracking cookies are designed equally so that visitors are not tricked into agreeing.

https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-success-orfat-must-correct-misleadin...

This whole cookie dickover concept is malicious compliance. The goal was: no tracking but ask consent if you must ("who would do this, that would be super annoying"). Except every website decided they'd rather annoy everyone.

A properly informed person would've understood that's what they'd do. They'd also probably realize cookies are not a big deal.

Tracking people around the web (especially without asking) is a big deal though.

Right the intention was to stop unchecked surveillance capitalism, now they use the normalcy of annoyance to wear you down such that you auto accept terms that you probably wouldn’t agree to if you read them. That’s what they want now.

This and other bad behavior will only go away when government says, “no this is predatory and you can’t do it” instead of saying “everything is OK if the user consents to it”.

Clicking a button could also not be a big deal, but yet here we are.

GDPR doesn't mandate cookie banners, it says that you simply cannot store irrelevant PII for the sake of it. That's the point of it: to protect the privacy of the public against "data brokers" and other scum. You're welcome.

People seem to have forgotten, but cookie banners were a pest before GDPR. And newsletters and login popovers, those are GDPR?

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