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Cookie banners have taken the internet back 20 years. Now every website has a mandatory popup. And you can’t block these new breed because they're part of the s

• notechback 7y ago
  They are not mandatory, it's a choice by the site owner to include them. They are only mandatory if you include tracking features that track users across the web (= ads and Google analytics).
  • mfontani 7y ago
    One can include ads and analytics without consent being granted - they're "just" restricted to a method of delivering ads and performing analytics which don't track the user. IANAL, mind you - but that's how we implemented it - you're opting-in to the ads that target you and analytics which track you, or you get the non-tracking/non-targeting ads and analytics.
    • skrtskrt 7y ago
      What are some good non-tracking & non-intrusive ad providers? I've wondered about one day being able to put a few "ethical" ads on a blog site.
      • mfontani 7y ago
        I wouldn't say "ethical", but even Google's pubads can do non-tracking. For pubads, look into "setCookieOptions(1)" and "setRequestNonPersonalizedAds(1)" for a good start on the matter. It _can_ be done.
      • nicbou 7y ago
        Affiliate marketing is the best way to go. You have full control on how you advertise products. For my website [1], I have build close relationships with local experts. They provide services my readers need, and I know they can be trusted. I get a commission from resulting sales. I like that model because advertisers have zero access to or control over the readers' data. Unfortunately, it's simply not applicable to all websites. - [1] https://allaboutberlin.com/ https://allaboutberlin.com/
      • bartread 7y ago
        You don't need to look far. You can simply tell Adsense[1] to serve up non-personalised ads: (adsbygoogle=window.adsbygoogle || []).requestNonPersonalizedAds = true; If you do this you don't even need to check for consent since you're not tracking the user or storing any PII. In my case this is what I call if the user doesn't accept advertising cookies, but there's no reason you can't disable them completely on your site if that's what you'd like. You also have pretty tight control over the categories of ad that Adsense can display, and you can even go as far as to review individual adverts. I've booted a couple of ads that I found to be unethical/distasteful from my site using the review feature in Adsense. The only issue with Adsense is that there are a gazillion ads it might show on your site, so I'd recommend filtering out any categories you don't much like first, and then reviewing ads sorted by popularity/impressions in descending order, otherwise you'll quickly go mad. [1] Obviously not an option if you absolutely don't want to do business with Google.
        • luckylion 7y ago
          > If you do this you don't even need to check for consent since you're not tracking the user or storing any PII. Google seems to disagree [1]: Non-personalized ads are targeted using contextual information rather than the past behavior of a user. Although these ads don’t use cookies for ads personalization, they do use cookies to allow for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse. Consent is therefore required to use cookies for those purposes from users in countries to which the EU ePrivacy Directive’s cookie provisions apply. What's not clear from Google's documentation, but what I assume, is that they also do not use the info about the context & visitor to serve them personalized ads on other websites. [1] https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/7670013 https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/7670013
          • mfontani 7y ago
            Well, sure - you can still send some signals to see ads that are relevant to the _content_ as opposed to the _viewer_. Example: you're seeing an article about devops and you get an ad about AWS instead of an ad that has followed you around from another website you visited previously. The cookie used for frequency capping is considered to be a "technical cookie" and has no bearing on privacy, best I can tell. The other types of cookies can be pretty much disabled at the point of calling the google tag, or enabled (along with more tracking/targeting ads) if the user consented to that.
  • nicbou 7y ago
    > across the web That part is not necessary. They are mandatory if you collect any form of personal data without legitimate interest.
  • cwbrandsma 7y ago
    Which means any website that does anything useful. That doesn't mean ads, but Google Analytics (or another comparable service) is just about everywhere these days.
    • yoz-y 7y ago
      It doesn't have to be a modal popup either. If your default is truly "off" then you could have a banner on top or bottom or somewhere saying something like "please help us make the site better..." or whatever.
    • kohtatsu 7y ago
      Google Analytics being everywhere is a at least an order of magnitude worse than the embedded like button spying.
      • TomMarius 7y ago
        I disagree. Facebook has much more power over advertising to their users (by personalizing the wall).
        • TeMPOraL 7y ago
          Facebook personalizes the Facebook wall. Google personalizes almost every other page you visit and mobile applications/games you use. Not sure how Facebook is more dangerous here.
          • TomMarius 7y ago
            No, it doesn't. I use adblock, as does a lot of other users. The FB wall is organized to my liking without any direct ads needed.
    • ferzul 7y ago
      but that isn't intrinsic to useful services. it is possible to run a profitable bookstore or organise an event without tracking individual users.
  • adrr 7y ago
    Or if you do Ab testing, or any e-commerce feature like a shopping cart. Internet is more than ad supported sites.
    • noisem4ker 7y ago
      Both false. A/B testing is allowed and doesn't need opt-in if the A-or-B preference is only recorded in aggregate form and not tied to the user. Same for the purchasing scenario. In this case, you would be explicitly collecting personal data to fulfill the order.
      • tripzilch 7y ago
        Crazy how people whose job it is to build this crap, don't even know what the actual rules are. It's almost as if they just want to collect all the data on all the users forever without any oversight, by continuously rehashing bad and misunderstood versions of the GDPR and pretending it's hard and complex and vague.
    • Jare 7y ago
      You don't have to assume your user wants to be A/B tracked, or wants to purchase anything. You can allow the user to enable them nicely and non-intrusively without a popup. You can ask the user intrusively when they actually initiate a purchasing action. Most sites choose do popup instead because (they think) it is more effective. So be it, but don't say it's "mandatory" or that "they are forced to".
    • goto11 7y ago
      You don't have to warn the users for using a cookie for a shopping cart. That is considered basic functionality.
  • nsxwolf 7y ago
    It's a choice so many site owners have made that the web is effectively ruined.
  • markdown 7y ago
    I refuse to include them. I am not a citizen of an EU country and I don't give a rats arse what the EU thinks of my website. They aren't the boss of me.
• GvS 7y ago
  You can easily block them with uBlock.
  • dcow 7y ago
    How can I do this?
    • DangitBobby 7y ago
      Pretty sure GP is talking about the HTML elemenent blocker feature, which is not really a solution since you'd still have to use manually on each new site you visit.
    • noisem4ker 7y ago
      There are blocklists dedicated to cookie request elements. You can install one of those in your uBlock Origin and the banners will disappear. I use and appreciate this one: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/ https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/
• jimmaswell 7y ago
  And all for what, some feel-good legislation that accomplishes nothing but making the web less profitable and entrenching big companies that can afford the wasted resources of their legal team navigating it. Nobody has ever been hurt by a tracking cookie in the history of the internet. It reminds me a bit of legislation in other areas that aims to make something so inconvenient people give up on it, like the death by a thousand cuts to American gun owners with state laws making magazine limits smaller and smaller over time, banning this and that cosmetic feature that has no bearing on anyone's safety, etc. What is Europe's vested interest in doing this to the internet though, information control (regulate a few conglomerates instead of having to deal with a bunch of little sites, by stamping out the little sites) and spite towards America's much more prosperous tech sector?
  • matheusmoreira 7y ago
    > making the web less profitable This could actually be a good thing. These days advertisers act as censors: all it takes is a bunch of complaints and a website's revenue stream gets pulled. The webmasters react by deleting the controversial content and avoiding the subject in the future. If this is what a profitable internet looks like it should probably die. > Nobody has ever been hurt by a tracking cookie in the history of the internet. How do you know? > stamping out the little sites Social media is responsible for this. Few people buy domains these days, it's much easier to register a name on some existing site. Most traffic originates from social media these days.
    • vkou 7y ago
      > This could actually be a good thing. These days advertisers act as censors: all it takes is a bunch of complaints and a website's revenue stream gets pulled. The webmasters react by deleting the controversial content and avoiding the subject in the future. If this is what a profitable internet looks like it should probably die. This is how newspapers have operated for nearly a century, and how television operated for over 60 years. What do you expect will replace it? A reversion to the patronage system? I don't think Bloomberg or Murdoch paying for content to be made in the way they want it is going to be an improvement.
• tjoff 7y ago
  No. In the pursuit of pure greed incompetent designers have taken the internet back 20 years. That people absolutely ruin the user experience of their site deliberately is an active decision they make themselves. Make an effort not to visit those sites. You will be surprised to know that people that make such bad decisions for their site seldom have any valuable content anyway.
• Reason077 7y ago
  > ”Cookie banners have taken the internet back 20 years.” I agree. The EU cookie laws were well-meaning, but have had the unintended consequence of making the web more annoying, more difficult to use, and more fragmented. The solution? Cookie consent should be a built-in feature of browsers and http, not something that is reimplemented in a slightly different way by every single website. Your browser should pop up a standardised cookie consent request when you browse a new site, and enforce your selection as part of its security policy. If you choose to block all cookies (ie: private browsing mode) then the cookie consent request wouldn’t need to appear at all.
  • akersten 7y ago
    If only the regulators had been happy with (or even aware of?) the existing capabilities of browsers to manage cookie consent, like "Block 3rd party cookies" and "block all cookies" that have been around since the late 90's, we wouldn't even have needed to add anything new to websites or browsers!
    • cnorthwood 7y ago
      The legislators haven't legislated for a particular mechanism, they've just said that any tracking has to be opt in, as opposed to opt out. Do Not Track was a technical solution for this, but when IE made do not track the default, and tracking something you had to opt in to, they panicked and stopped supporting the headers and instead preferring the cookie walls, rather than trusting the browser settings. If websites respected UA settings, and the UA implemented DNT in a way that's compatible with the law (so, DNT: 0 only when you opt in), then we wouldn't be here
      • akersten 7y ago
        Not sure what DNT has to do with it. Do Not Track was circa 2009, we were already "here" at that point. The cookie law was like 2002.
    • kalleboo 7y ago
      EU legislators avoid legislating particular technical solutions, since those tend to not age well (see the uproar on HN when it was reported that the EU legislated to mandate USB-C, when they didn't actually do that, they just mandated that the industry agree on a standard)
• d4rti 7y ago
  I should be able to set a browser preference that I only ever want functional first party cookies, unless I whitelist the site.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• HenryBemis 7y ago
  > And you can’t block these I beg to differ. I use AdBlockPlus (ABP) and I can block 99% of these banners, and proceed immediately to the website. One can also use NoScript to block some websites that are full of crap/trackers (like techcrunch).
  • cookiengineer 7y ago
    AdBlock Plus is owned by eyeo GmbH which actively forces media and news agencies to pay fees to allow advertising in their "acceptable ads" program. You can look that up on northdata. I would heavily recommend to switch to uBlock Origin (and maybe uMatrix) instead. Disclosure: worked for eyeo in the past, and quit.
• Causality1 7y ago
  Indeed. It doesn't make much difference to me if the pop-up I'm clicking out of is talking about cookies or offering me hot redheads in my area.
• olalonde 7y ago
  What if browsers had an optional "consent to any cookie" setting that sent a `X-Cookie-Consent: Accept` header on every request? This header could be used by websites to decide whether to display the cookie consent popup. Would that be acceptable to EU regulators?
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    X-Cookie-Consent: Accept would be explicitly illegal; consent must be specific. However, I believe X-Cookie-Consent: Deny would be sufficient grounds to not bother with showing cookie popups and assuming the user does not consent. But you don't need that anyway; lack of consent is the default state. I propose a better alternative: just stop doing things requiring consent (which are, by definition, unnecessary, and almost always support an unethical business model), and then you won't have to annoy users with consent popups anymore.
    • olalonde 7y ago
      I'd say a better alternative would be to allow people who don't care about cookie tracking to opt out entirely from the consent popups. It wouldn't change anything for you but it would be a big improvement for people like me who don't mind tracking and are just annoyed by the popups. Too bad that it's now illegal...
      • TeMPOraL 7y ago
        It can't be, because we both know how would it end. If you allowed people to auto opt-in, then malicious actors on the web, which currently show you consent popups, would instead use dark patterns to get people who don't want to be tracked to permanently opt-in anyway.
• tripzilch 7y ago
  > Now every website has a mandatory popup. Stop spreading this disinformation. It's just the filthy websites that track your every move on the site and then give it to third parties. Would you rather they do that by default, extracting your data before you even notice, without even being able to distinguish the bad actor from the good actor? The problem is that people think it's the cookie banner that's annoying, when it's in fact the very website that has been secretly abusing your privacy, except now they tell you. The people think that agreeing to the tracking banner is a fair transaction because the adtech banner is being disingenuous. It's as if the entrance to a museum requires you to dump one empty battery in the ocean. It's a bit of a hassle but it doesn't cost you anything, and you get to see the museum which is what you want. Except in 90% of the cases the museum is clickbait trash. I mean I agree. No website should use cookie banners. None of them. Increasing fines all around for those adtech fuckheads.
• WhyNotHugo 7y ago
  Hint: You can use ublock origin. Go to its settings page, and check the "annoyances" lists. This hides all this BS. (I do entirely agree with you, the default internet is pretty much like you said, sadly)
• zelphirkalt 7y ago
  I usually use uBlock Origin's element blocking to remove such popups, even if only for one time, or I use inspector to remove elements. If afterwards nothing is visible of the content, I leave. Seems like someone forgot to put the content on the page. shrugs