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I don't care about cookies
- schoen 6y agoA subtlety that may be obscured by the name: the software developer is suggesting that people use technological self-help (proactively blocking and deleting cookies) instead of spending a lot of their time and energy repeatedly performing the same cookie consent actions. It's not so much "I don't care at all" as "I want to deal with cookies by a different method than being notified of them over and over again".
- ALittleLight 6y agoI didn't get that from this webpage. It seems like his extension just accepts all cookie requests and doesn't delete them.
- jhugo 6y agoDid you read the first paragraph of the page by any chance? “If you surf anonymously or if you delete cookies automatically every time you close the browser, websites will ask for that permission again and again, and it will soon become very irritating to click the same I agree buttons every day.” The extension doesn't claim to delete cookies (and GP doesn't suggest that it does), but it's clearly targeted at people that are using technological means to deal with the problem rather than clicking "pretty please don't track me" and hoping for the best.
- croes 6y agoWhy surf anonymously or delete the cookies after all if you click "I agree" every time?
- throwaway53453 6y agoBecause those cookies are cleared when the tab is closed and most of the major ad networks (Google, Amazon) forget who you are when that happens. Why worry about it?
- sixothree 6y agoLol. Do they really.
- Nextgrid 6y agoThis is wrongly downvoted despite being absolutely right. There's a big misunderstanding behind these "cookie" consent prompts. They are actually about overall data processing consent regardless of technical means - this includes cookies but also things like browser fingerprinting, IP addresses, etc which will persist despite clearing cookies. Using an extension that automatically grants consent and merely deletes cookies every time would give you a false sense of security if the automatically granted consent allows them to use your browser's fingerprint or IP address to track you anyway.
- 3np 6y agoAt least if you’re in EU, active consent is required to comply with the GDPR. This means that if you do what this extension does (filter out the UI elements and ignore dialogs), it’s illegal for a website to save PII about you and your visit. Many websites and data processors violate this, but since that’s the case for those sites the only winning move is not to play.
- dkersten 6y agoMany websites are not compliant though, so while its illegal, they're still doing it. For example, GDPR requires opt-in, many websites have opt-out. Its illegal, but if its not being enforced, then...
- Nextgrid 6y agoIt could be argued that if the consent prompt can’t be dismissed without providing an answer (whether accept or decline) and you use technical means to circumvent that then it’s fair for the system to track you anyway as it’s undefined behavior?
- throwaway53453 6y ago
- karaterobot 6y agoThe reality is that very few websites actually let you choose whether to accept tracking cookies or not. For the most part, they set the cookies immediately, even before the disclosure banner appears. Most of them don't even include the option to opt out. It doesn't matter that this is against both the spirit and the letter of the GDPR. Those banners are just an annoying bit of compliance theater. Given that I'm getting the cookies whether I want them or not, and deleting them whenever my browser closes, if this extension keeps the banners off my screen it's a huge net positive from my perspective.
- pvinis 6y agoHow did this take so long to be made? I'll install this and try it tomorrow.
- tech234a 6y agoIt’s actually been around for a while; the Internet Archive seems to indicate that it has been around since at least January 2014 [1], and I’ve been using the filter list with UBlock Origin for at least a couple years now. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170831060807/https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/versions/?page=3 https://web.archive.org/web/20170831060807/https://addons.mo...
- MattGaiser 6y agoExcellent. I hate having to constantly click through those.
- nickt 6y agoHush performs a similar function for Safari users. https://oblador.github.io/hush/ https://oblador.github.io/hush/
- rlpb 6y agoThe consent popups you see aren't just about cookies though. They want (and sometimes illegally force) you to consent to processing of your personal information for reasons beyond just providing you with a service (or more commonly just reading an article). Cookies might be one technical means to assist with that, but it's not the only means.
- Proven 6y agoI don't care about that either. If I cared I wouldn't have visited sites with cookies, or any sites at all.
- raverbashing 6y agoFor those, I wanted an extension that replaced data on the cookies with some random data at every access Enjoy tracking that
- koolba 6y agoThere’s the added joy that some poorly written data munger is going to crash when it receives session tokens that never existed.
- topspin 6y ago> The consent popups you see aren't just about cookies though. I don't care about all the other stuff the popups are about either. The popups are pointless, click-through damage and they serve no purpose. The laws that caused them to exist are equally pointless. There is no measurable benefit to any of this privacy theater and no less tracking is occurring since the advent of all of these pointless popups.
- croes 6y ago“If you surf anonymously" Does he confuse incognito mode with anonymous surfing?
- readflaggedcomm 6y agoHe offers ubo/abp block lists and says his extension accepts the policy when necessary. But there is no configuration, no way to add new site rules, and no source repo (would have to open the xpi myself). It seems more useful to write my own Greasemonkey script, instead. At least when I encounter a site like this, which I couldn't think of.
- loloquwowndueo 6y agoThis extension is awesome. It wouldn’t be so necessary if all those websites asking for my permission to use cookies would actually use a cookie to store that permission / preference so they don’t ask again every damn time. This is really the reason why I use this extension - I didn’t mind so much reviewing the permissions once for each site, but having to do it constantly really became too much after a certain point.
- namelessone 6y agobut most do. I only have to redo my choice after I clean my browser data. Maybe you have your browser configured to automatically clean data after close?
- tamrix 6y agoThey should just rename cookies to biscuits and be done with it for good.
- cristoperb 6y agoI use this javascript bookmarklet to remove sticky headers/footers/popups: https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky
- ronjouch 6y agoOr, if you already use uBlock Origin and would rather use its performant, customizable, extensible filtering capabilities instead of adding (and trusting!) yet another addon, just check the "EasyList Cookie" list in your Filter Lists :) .
- fctorial 6y agoBrowsers should allow users to install extensions from github.
- ronjouch 6y agoAFAIK, Firefox does, if you're running the beta/nightly channel (and maybe you need to have set an about:config pref too, I forgot, search about it). I install the beta release of uBlock Origin from its GitHub releases page. EDIT: browser makers are understandably cautious about it, even with a closed ecosystem it's already hard enough for them to avoid half their users getting pushed into installing dubious/malware addons within three hours of browsing, and their resources are limited. So, they default to closed-ness "for the masses", but there's a knob. I don't find this unreasonable.
- jesboat 6y agoIt'd be neat if extension stores could integrate with some CI system(s). The store could just tell the user "built from <source URL>". Best of both worlds.
- sdfhbdf 6y agoIt's a balancing act of security and opennes. Extensions so far had a really bad track record of having too much permissions. They could be detrimental to user's life if an extension can easily grab login cookies/credentials or whatever to your banking if you ever enter it in your own browser. I think more restrictions should be put on extensions but it's always hard to balance between accesible developers tools to people who know what they're doing and somebdoy writing down the instructions how to circumvent it to lure the user to install a malicious extension in developer mode.
- fctorial 6y agoHow does the extensions work. Does it have a hardcoded database with an entry for each website?
- ronjouch 6y agoIt's not exactly "an entry for each website", but yes it's based on a list: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/ https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/
- Nextgrid 6y agoThe vast majority of the annoying consent prompts are provided by a few vendors so are trivial to detect & block.
- fctorial 6y agoThis extension would be a good addition to the tor browser.
- systemvoltage 6y agoHow do you stay logged in without cookies? Aren’t they vital to logging in anywhere?
- nic-waller 6y agoSome sites use localstorage instead of cookies for session tracking.
- systemvoltage 6y agoThank you. According to a quick search [1], """ Cookies and local storage serve different purposes. Cookies are primarily for reading server-side, local storage can only be read by the client-side. So the question is, in your app, who needs this data — the client or the server? If it's your client (your JavaScript), then by all means switch. You're wasting bandwidth by sending all the data in each HTTP header. If it's your server, local storage isn't so useful because you'd have to forward the data along somehow (with Ajax or hidden form fields or something). This might be okay if the server only needs a small subset of the total data for each request. """ So I guess server-side no-JS applications are going to be caught in this crossfire? [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3220660/local-storage-vs-cookies https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3220660/local-storage-vs...
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoClient side apps will be caught as well. Putting a JWT in a HttpOnly cookie is a common pattern. In fact, many people recommend this approach over localStorage for security reasons.
- sergeykish 6y agoBoth cookie and localStorage are just a way to identify session. Basically: GET /user/#{localStorage.id} vs GET /user Cookie: id=#{Cookie.id} In both cases GDPR restricts user tracking and allows storing data that's required for domain to function properly.
- qyi 6y ago
- undersuit 6y agoI use Firefox Focus as my primary browser on the phone. I get some kind of thrill agreeing to cookies from sites that are going to disappear from my history in minutes.
- Tarq0n 6y agoThat means you also gave permission for them to identify you, store and process that data. And with things like canvas fingerprinting it doesn't matter that you deleted the cookies, they have a persistent identifier for you anyway.
- Daho0n 6y ago>they have a persistent identifier for you anyway I don't believe this to be true. My CS1 browser fingerprinting[1] results shows that Internet Explorer and Chromium (Chrome etc.) are trackable with fingerprinting but Firefox (at least for me) is not, neither on desktop or mobile. Of course they might have found something the researchers have not. 1: https://browser-fingerprint.cs.fau.de/ https://browser-fingerprint.cs.fau.de/
- undersuit 6y agoThanks, I gave away my information by signing up for the project and they say that Firefox Focus can not be 'tracked uniquely over time' after I did a test scan on my phone. Plain Firefox from the Android store had the same result, but that app actually does store my cookies.
- Daho0n 6y agoYou have to test over time to get a useful result. Also note that this test only test Fingerprinting. They don't use cookies to test if you can be tracked.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoI think this would actually massively increase security because you won’t be mindlessly clicking Yes to whatever a website says.
- akvadrako 6y agoWhy would you click "yes"? On legally implented sites it's just as easy to always click "no".
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoI guess I thought they wouldn’t let me in if I click no! I still think it is easy for a malicious site to make both the yes and no button install X malware when you click it. I don’t know if that fear is valid but as a Windows 95 and 98 ptsd person we were trained don’t click and agree to anything.
- ashleyn 6y agoI suppose I'll add this to the growing constellation of add-ons considered essential just to even get around the web without annoying, managerially-imposed dark patterns interrupting my workflow.
- polocode 6y agoHonestly, I think it is our job as the creators/hackers to come up with a better solution. The problem is very real, and needs to be fixed. But no good solution has ever been created by lawyers. Ever. So here we are, left with a forest of cookie warnings that perfectly break the internet. So here is a proposal: What if a user could declare her/his consent settings _before_ opening the website? There would no longer be a need for consent dialogues, right? One way to achieve that would be to take an example from the UTM parameters. A browser/User could just use ?utm_consent=all, ?utm_consent=minimal, and ?utm_consent=deny to indicate the level of consent. Browsers could offer it as a standard setting and automatically amend it to any URL. Websites could just drop the consent dialogue whenever that UTM is set.
- nyanpasu64 6y agoAnd the do-not-track header was created, and promptly ignored and used as a form of fingerprinting, due to an absence of legal backing.
- Arch-TK 6y agoSurely there's an easier way: Standardize an extension to the Set-Cookie header for a "Purpose" field. This field if unset means the cookie is essential (local laws now still apply so if a website misrepresents a non-essential cookie as essential then that's illegal just the same way as implementing a fake cookie banner or not implementing one (if you need it) is illegal). Now in my browser I can set my cookie preferences to only store and send essential cookies. For other tracking methods that don't use cookies there's already DNT and all that's needed is for a local law update to clarify what it means and to enforce its use. These things would actually make sense as opposed to the current situation where the EU makes it sound like cookies are something a website forcibly stores on your computer and uses.
- polocode 6y agoBeautiful technical solution. Wouldn’t it depend on all website creators and all browser makers to pretty much commit to changes in their code at the same time, before the first consent banner would actually go away? How do you get them to do that?
- buisi 6y agoRelevant: https://twitter.com/EstelMP/status/1369936040702730241 https://twitter.com/EstelMP/status/1369936040702730241 The new E-Privacy Directive (if it doesn't get watered down) might help with the cookie wall problem.
- plater 6y agoThe problem with cookie popups is that it trains people to just click Yes and OK without thinking and reading. At the end we get blind to them and we click and accept things which are much more important, download viruses, click bad links or whatever. What's needed is better default protection by the law to stop companies collecting and using data.
- bartvk 6y agoBy the same developer: the No Thanks extension. Blocks most newsletter offers, subscription begging views, etc. It costs a bit of money, but when asked, an invoice is provided so you can deduct it as a business, or ask your boss to pay. https://www.no-thanks-extension.com/ https://www.no-thanks-extension.com/
- jackjeff 6y agoI’ve used this for years and it’s brilliant. I really don’t care about cookies because I pair this extension with “cookie auto delete”, so whatever these cookies do, they would disappear. The only downside is that some sites are broken by this extension. Sometimes you end up on a site where the page is disabled and you cannot click on things. Usually turning off the extension and clicking manually the banner fixes the issue. So here are the three extensions I can’t live without: - ublock origin - I don’t care about cookies - cookie auto delete. They make the internet usable.
- markburns 6y agoublock origin has a setting that rejects cookies in the GDPR notices instead of accepting them
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y agoWhere is it?
- markburns 6y agoIt's the annoyances section. I checked all of these and haven't been bothered since.
- yoavm 6y agoI wish it was that easy. I'm also using Cookie Auto Delete and uBlock Origin, but remember that many of the tools you are agreeing to use fingerprinting, meaning that even if you delete their cookies they'll keep tracking you around the web. It's safer to not agree to load them IMHO.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y agoWhy not program that extension to refuse cookie instead?
- Odenwaelder 6y agoThis browser plugin automatically accepted a Notion.so pop up to upgrade to enterprise plan. Beware of this plugin!
- luckylion 6y agoUhh, that's bad. Come to think of it, a malicious company could probably set up their systems so they get auto-confirmed by the plugin. I'm not sure they'd be valid in that case. Similar attacks: load the fine print via JS and stick it into an /ads/advertisement.js so adblockers will block the loading of it. Can the company claim "we showed it to the user, if their software hides it, that's not our problem"?
- sdfhbdf 6y agoNo, the user did not consent. They have to be aware of such systems not game it. The intent and the consent have to be clear to both parties. Agreement is about respect not about malice. If an consent is maliciously hidden away, no matter how technically then it's not valid. Law is not binary in these cases, it's all about the circumstance.
- luckylion 6y agoThat's what I figure, but how does that work for e.g. Cookie Consent? The user has a plugin that just clicks "Accept" on the consent overlay. They don't read the consent, they're not aware of what they consent to specifically. Is their (or their plugin's, acting as their agent) consent valid because they know about the general framework (tracking cookies)? And would that consent depend on the overlay not including any surprising terms (e.g. "you're also buying a washing machine", "you're also allowing us to mine crypto in your browser" or "we may also use browser finger printing, not just cookies")?
- butz 6y agoIt would be even more useful if extension had additional rules to always set minimal permissions level for a website; easier when using standard cookie banners, harder for custom coded ones. Alternative solution: individual cookie allow/block list, so only useful (language settings, login etc.) cookies could be set.
- admissionsguy 6y agoI have been using this for months and it hugely improved my web browsing experience. I would love it to become a browser feature at some point. (Yes, I really dislike how the "privacy" warriors are dragging everyone into their pointless crusades.)
- enumjorge 6y agoPointless in your opinion. Tech companies’ obsession with tracking has really degraded the experience of the web, and at least someone is pushing back. If you don’t like the situation get mad at the companies who abused the lack of regulation.
- Diti 6y agoI do not like this extension. I would rather use this one, which is the work of a public university: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...
- alwayshasbeen 6y agoThose cookie warnings are a classic ill-conceived solution. No user reads it, everyone is just clicking "Accept". So what privacy gain do we get?
- timdaub 6y agoWhat we should have instead of custom cookie banners is the browser asking. As it's being done with other APIs too.