This is a jaw-drop moment for me every single time I observe someone else using the web and quickly clicking "accept" on every single cookie banners that pops up, without ever wasting a second even reading what they're accepting. It's mind boggling to me. Sure, I'm in IT, so surely I'm more aware of data mining, profiling, and other privacy-related aspects. But in many cases, you could just click "reject" and the banner would also disappear...
To me, having a browser setting for cookies is the only sane way to handle this, it's surprising that this was not considered from the beginning.
Some variant on "reject" takes more effort like 70% of the time. Which is on purpose, of course. The ones that aren't maliciously-complying have a "necessary only" button that insta-closes it, but tons pretend that you might want to allow some spying but not all of it and make you go through another screen if you don't just "accept all".
> To me, having a browser setting for cookies is the only sane way to handle this, it's surprising that this was not considered from the beginning.
Then it'd be possible to default it to "nope" (Firefox, and perhaps Safari, might do this) or to allow a "never, anywhere" setting the first time the question is asked, and malware and spyware vendors know that'd mean a much larger proportion of denials.
Clicking those "REJECT!" buttons might make you feel empowered, but it's pointless. Just set your browser to delete all the cookies at the end of the session except for whatever sites you want to allow to 'remember' you.
The whole thing has always been a problem to be properly solved by the browser, and it's probably just the fact that Google makes the only browser that matters, that it's been foisted upon every website owner, who mostly just wants basic analytics and to track conversions from the ads they run, and isn't "selling your data."
The browser is your user agent. If it's sending any information up to web servers on every request that isn't okay with you, why are you using it?
It is known that warnings and pop-ups that show up almost all the time yield diminishing returns. I think it was named "normalization of deviation" by some folks in a blog a while ago, and I believe that name fits. If you get warned about missing https all the time, or that something might be dangerous (even though it does precisely what you want it to do), it will loose its effect by the time you actually need it.
You can argue this is malicious compliance, but if you want it to go away it would probably be easier to go for banning tracking and personalized ads altogether. Eliminate the reason for this behavior, so to speak.
There is one. It's a DNT header. Knucklehead websites ignore it.
Like it or not, the Web is a two-way street, meaning that the server end of the transaction doesn't owe the client end anything in particular unless there's some relationship in place (like a payment). It appears the "just ignore it" matches the intent of most web users, though, since an overwhelming majority of web visitors accept a bunch of spammy ads + free 'content,' and a slim minority pay for ad-free alternatives.
So do car alarms.
I'm not convinced this is a business model I want to exist. We had an internet before it, and Google, and Facebook. I'm increasingly sad we can't return to it.
Oftentimes the reject flow is substantially more annoying than the accept flow. I click reject myself when it's an option, but I can absolutely understand how people might get conditioned to click accept when clicking reject might result in more popups.
What harm are you worried about?
Lack of privacy harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say.
This is exactly what browsers did back the 90s, they asked about every single cookie.
Then browsers got configurable options to simply accept either all cookies, no cookies, or only first party cookies (excluding third party sites unrelated to the domain you visited).
For now well over 20 years I have disabled 3rd party cookies in all browsers I use, and only in a few cases overall did I need to make exemptions.
They will fingerprint you with or without cookies. They may or not try to honor your preferences, but their "partners" will not try, and by the time you see that banner, it's all out there.
"Accept" is the close button.
There's a mismatch between the velocity at which people visit sites and the time it takes to navigate the cookie particulars of each site.
And, we can dismiss this as people being uninformed or lazy but the reality it is that's actually not so unreasonable. Cookies are in some ways near the bottom of the list where privacy is concerned, given everything else from breaches to search dossiers to device finger-printing to mobile device location-tracking to the ubiquity of cameras in the real world, and on and on.
The idea that we're clawing back privacy in any meaningful sense by blocking a few cookies here and there is kind of quaint.
People do not have a right (morally speaking, not legally) to access or use a service (or a website) etc without having to read/agree to the terms (applies to analog and digital).