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> IDCAC accepts cookies if there is no option to decline them. You don't see annoying popups anymore, but the cookies are still there tracking you. Yes. Becaus

> IDCAC accepts cookies if there is no option to decline them. You don't see annoying popups anymore, but the cookies are still there tracking you. Yes. Because I don't care about cookies. This is not an anti-tracking extension. I do not care about being tracked. I just want to stop being bombarded with cookie consent dialogs.

PaulHoule 4y ago
It is an unpopular opinion but I see GDPR as a watershed for user hostile design. It used to be that people involved with the web read Jacob Nielsen and Don’t Make Me Think, there was always pressure from the suits to distract users with BS but it was possible to hold the line. Once the GDPR came out, now it was required, even admirable, to distract users. Once that window was broken the car got stripped within 24 hours and now it is not unusual to have to dismiss 3 or more pop ups asking you to subscribe to an email newsletter.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  I think you're partly right but it happened before GDPR - when advertisers decided to ignore the DNT[1] flag. If DNT was respected, GDPR cookie pop ups would be unnecessary. Unfortunately the modern web is not about user choice but about herding users like cattle to maximize "engagement". [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track
  - Analemma_ 4y ago
    DNT was an "evil bit" non-solution that was stupid all the way from initial concept to execution to predictable industry response. We are better off without it.
    - TillE 4y ago
      Millions of websites are currently showing stupid cookie popups because they're mandated by law to obtain the user's consent. Why shouldn't that consent or lack thereof be expressed once in the browser UI instead? The only issue with DNT is that it wasn't mandated.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        Exactly. My agent speaks for me. That it's inconvenient for the tracking industry and thus was ignored is an enforcement issue, not a technical one. If my browser tells you not to track me, it should be illegal to ask me again.
        runiq 4y ago
        > Exactly. My agent speaks for me. That's it. We don't call it a user agent for nothing. Or rather, we shouldn't, but we are.
      - thwarted 4y ago
        There was P3P, started over two decades ago, which never gained traction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P https://www.w3.org/P3P/ https://www.w3.org/P3P/ From Wikipedia: As an example, a user may store in the browser preferences that information about their browsing habits should not be collected. If the policy of a Website states that a cookie is used for this purpose, the browser automatically rejects the cookie.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      No. The problem is the legal framework for user tracking informed consent didn't exist back then. Sites wouldn't be able to simply ignore DNT if doing so created legal liability for them. Corporations essentially had a presumed right to track users. Now they don't, they need to get informed consent first. A DNT header makes the user's non-consent explicit: not only is the user presumed not to have consented to tracking, the presence of this header signals active and explicit denial of consent from the user. It's not like the evil bit at all. We're dealing with corporations that operate openly on the market. It's perfectly possible to say "it's illegal to ignore this bit" if it comes with the threat of heavy fines attached.
- bottlero_cket 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1435827240286109702?s=46&t=Td8BBAlI_qFsWBTKfjBukQ https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1435827240286109702?s=46... there’s a good example of 25 seconds of constant bombardment for InfoWorld visitors. I cant count the popups.
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  I have a zero-tolerance policy for dialogs, with few exceptions. If I can't use the site while ignoring them, I close the tab. What I realized after a while that this sort of user-hostile design correlates strongly with poor quality content, so it's also a great way to save my time.
  - tripa 4y ago
    > I have a zero-tolerance policy for […], with few exceptions That's not how zero-tolerance works.
    - uwuemu 4y ago
      lmao
    - forgotmypw17 4y ago
      Touché. I guess I should clarify that in the rare case I still want to access the content, I still do not engage with the modal dialogs, but instead use a proxy service such as archive.is to present it in an accessible way. I consider modals to be a gross accessibility issue.
      - PaulHoule 4y ago
        I went through a phase when I was reading way too much about communism and riding shotgun back and forth to Buffalo a lot while stoned and resolved I was going to quit reading the web with a normal web browser but instead I was going to run everything through a workflow system that would convert web sites to HAR files, strip out all the ads and bullshit. I worked on it pretty seriously for two weeks but got hung up on the problem that my web archiving system was never 100% sure that a page had finished loading (that there would be more significant AJAX calls) so it would set long timeouts and even with a lot of stripping out the junk it was going to be even more awkward than dealing with the junk. Looking back at it however it looked like an overly ambitious project.
      - nyanpasu64 4y ago
        I'd use archive.is if it didn't have a CAPTCHA system and stalk users by injecting fingerprinting into served pages.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  You're confused. The EU's cookie consent dialogues do not come from the GDPR; they're several years older than that. They come from the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive (ePD), particularly the 2009 amendment to that.
throwaway787544 4y ago
THANK. YOU. I feel like I'm the only other person on HN that could give a shit who tracks me. The banners are so annoying! Just track me already!!!
- OrderlyTiamat 4y ago
  well these are different purposes, aren't they? I do delete the cookies afterwards, so I don't care whether they get accepted or denied. But for this extention, the purpose was always just to get rid of the popups. I mean if you're automating it anyway, it's much easier to choose the happy path and comply isn't it? Those cookies can always be deleted later.
- xdavidliu 4y ago
  > that could give a shit who tracks me nit: couldn't though I completely agree with your sentiment
- d0mine 4y ago
  "Just track me already!!!" said "throwaway.." If the first part were true, the second would be your name.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    I share the sentiment of my fellow throwaway friend Also your comment doesn't make sense. They're different things. I'm fine with being tracked by a service operator, I don't want my name to be public.
    - yaddaor 4y ago
- causality0 4y ago
  That's one of the odder things about the HN user base. How much we care about things seems to have little to do with how much they affect our lives. Most of us exist with a magic shield carefully affixed to our every point of contact with the electronic world that fully insulates us from anything we don't want to see, but it is maniacally important to us that Google doesn't know it was John Smith who searched for "sexy ostriches" eight years ago.
Ajedi32 4y ago
And to the extent that you do care, you can just block the cookies at the browser level. In-page pop ups on every site is about the stupidest way imaginable to implement anti-tracking controls.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  That's because the alternative is for browsers to send a "I-WANT-TO-BE-TRACKED" header if users want tracking and then basically no-one would consent. The simplest way would be for companies to stop tracking individuals then they wouldn't need to seek cookie consent.
  - csunbird 4y ago
    > That's because the alternative is for browsers to send a "I-WANT-TO-BE-TRACKED" header if users want tracking and then basically no-one would consent. I would say that, getting companies to convince the user that they would be better if they are tracked would be a good feature. Currently,tracking helps the company and hurts the customer, so companies should come up with a reason why tracking is actually good for the customer.
- esperent 4y ago
  That's intentional - it's malicious compliance from thousands of companies who really want to track you. They are following the law in a way that makes it as annoying as possible for the people whom the law protects.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
I thought they answered their perceived flaw quite well though! sounds like it’s trivial to add privacy to the popup block, so I’m all for it
berdario 4y ago
Yeah, but if you're not aware of this gotcha, the extension takes the choice away from you. It's good that the parent post highlighted this issue. I don't care a lot about cookies, but if a website is abusive enough that they need to ask for my permission, I prefer to deny it rather than give them a blanket approval (again: what I really care about is wasteful and overbearing JavaScript code that complements tracking via cookie... If I cannot object to that, at least let me object to cookies used for tracking) Again: you don't need permission for necessary cookies. The fact that the cookie prompt is annoying/difficult to parse and requires opt-out instead of opt-in is against the spirit (and possibly the letter) of the law. If our automation around the cookie prompt is accidentally giving an implicit consent, we ended up doing exactly what the people that push pervasive tracking wanted. We end up rewarding, instead of punishing, people who implemented dark patterns.
- mustyoshi 4y ago
  > I don't care a lot about cookies, but if a website is abusive enough that they need to ask for my permission How do you tell the difference? > Again: you don't need permission for necessary cookies. Usually it's better to ask forgiveness than permission, but I can understand sites wanting to play it safe and throw up a banner even if they only have "legal" cookies.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  The extension is far more useful if you block all cookies by default and whitelist the domains you allow to set them, like me. When you do that, every time you visit a site, sometimes even every time you load a page on a site, you get a cookie pop-up. They should pair it with a "yes, I am an adult" extension.
- CephalopodMD 4y ago
  I mean, it's kinda in the title of the extension. If you install this extension, it's very obvious that you're okay with cookies... If you wanted that choice, you wouldn't install the extension. I don't understand why this would be an issue.

PaulHoule 4y ago

It is an unpopular opinion but I see GDPR as a watershed for user hostile design. It used to be that people involved with the web read Jacob Nielsen and Don’t Make Me Think, there was always pressure from the suits to distract users with BS but it was possible to hold the line. Once the GDPR came out, now it was required, even admirable, to distract users. Once that window was broken the car got stripped within 24 hours and now it is not unusual to have to dismiss 3 or more pop ups asking you to subscribe to an email newsletter.

AlexandrB 4y ago
I think you're partly right but it happened before GDPR - when advertisers decided to ignore the DNT[1] flag. If DNT was respected, GDPR cookie pop ups would be unnecessary. Unfortunately the modern web is not about user choice but about herding users like cattle to maximize "engagement". [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  DNT was an "evil bit" non-solution that was stupid all the way from initial concept to execution to predictable industry response. We are better off without it.
  - TillE 4y ago
    Millions of websites are currently showing stupid cookie popups because they're mandated by law to obtain the user's consent. Why shouldn't that consent or lack thereof be expressed once in the browser UI instead? The only issue with DNT is that it wasn't mandated.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Exactly. My agent speaks for me. That it's inconvenient for the tracking industry and thus was ignored is an enforcement issue, not a technical one. If my browser tells you not to track me, it should be illegal to ask me again.
      - runiq 4y ago
        > Exactly. My agent speaks for me. That's it. We don't call it a user agent for nothing. Or rather, we shouldn't, but we are.
    - thwarted 4y ago
      There was P3P, started over two decades ago, which never gained traction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P https://www.w3.org/P3P/ https://www.w3.org/P3P/ From Wikipedia: As an example, a user may store in the browser preferences that information about their browsing habits should not be collected. If the policy of a Website states that a cookie is used for this purpose, the browser automatically rejects the cookie.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    No. The problem is the legal framework for user tracking informed consent didn't exist back then. Sites wouldn't be able to simply ignore DNT if doing so created legal liability for them. Corporations essentially had a presumed right to track users. Now they don't, they need to get informed consent first. A DNT header makes the user's non-consent explicit: not only is the user presumed not to have consented to tracking, the presence of this header signals active and explicit denial of consent from the user. It's not like the evil bit at all. We're dealing with corporations that operate openly on the market. It's perfectly possible to say "it's illegal to ignore this bit" if it comes with the threat of heavy fines attached.
bottlero_cket 4y ago
https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1435827240286109702?s=46&t=Td8BBAlI_qFsWBTKfjBukQ https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1435827240286109702?s=46... there’s a good example of 25 seconds of constant bombardment for InfoWorld visitors. I cant count the popups.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
I have a zero-tolerance policy for dialogs, with few exceptions. If I can't use the site while ignoring them, I close the tab. What I realized after a while that this sort of user-hostile design correlates strongly with poor quality content, so it's also a great way to save my time.
- tripa 4y ago
  > I have a zero-tolerance policy for […], with few exceptions That's not how zero-tolerance works.
  - uwuemu 4y ago
    lmao
  - forgotmypw17 4y ago
    Touché. I guess I should clarify that in the rare case I still want to access the content, I still do not engage with the modal dialogs, but instead use a proxy service such as archive.is to present it in an accessible way. I consider modals to be a gross accessibility issue.
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      I went through a phase when I was reading way too much about communism and riding shotgun back and forth to Buffalo a lot while stoned and resolved I was going to quit reading the web with a normal web browser but instead I was going to run everything through a workflow system that would convert web sites to HAR files, strip out all the ads and bullshit. I worked on it pretty seriously for two weeks but got hung up on the problem that my web archiving system was never 100% sure that a page had finished loading (that there would be more significant AJAX calls) so it would set long timeouts and even with a lot of stripping out the junk it was going to be even more awkward than dealing with the junk. Looking back at it however it looked like an overly ambitious project.
    - nyanpasu64 4y ago
      I'd use archive.is if it didn't have a CAPTCHA system and stalk users by injecting fingerprinting into served pages.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
You're confused. The EU's cookie consent dialogues do not come from the GDPR; they're several years older than that. They come from the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive (ePD), particularly the 2009 amendment to that.

throwaway787544 4y ago

THANK. YOU. I feel like I'm the only other person on HN that could give a shit who tracks me. The banners are so annoying! Just track me already!!!

OrderlyTiamat 4y ago
well these are different purposes, aren't they? I do delete the cookies afterwards, so I don't care whether they get accepted or denied. But for this extention, the purpose was always just to get rid of the popups. I mean if you're automating it anyway, it's much easier to choose the happy path and comply isn't it? Those cookies can always be deleted later.
xdavidliu 4y ago
> that could give a shit who tracks me nit: couldn't though I completely agree with your sentiment
d0mine 4y ago
"Just track me already!!!" said "throwaway.." If the first part were true, the second would be your name.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  I share the sentiment of my fellow throwaway friend Also your comment doesn't make sense. They're different things. I'm fine with being tracked by a service operator, I don't want my name to be public.
  - yaddaor 4y ago
causality0 4y ago
That's one of the odder things about the HN user base. How much we care about things seems to have little to do with how much they affect our lives. Most of us exist with a magic shield carefully affixed to our every point of contact with the electronic world that fully insulates us from anything we don't want to see, but it is maniacally important to us that Google doesn't know it was John Smith who searched for "sexy ostriches" eight years ago.

Ajedi32 4y ago

And to the extent that you do care, you can just block the cookies at the browser level. In-page pop ups on every site is about the stupidest way imaginable to implement anti-tracking controls.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
That's because the alternative is for browsers to send a "I-WANT-TO-BE-TRACKED" header if users want tracking and then basically no-one would consent. The simplest way would be for companies to stop tracking individuals then they wouldn't need to seek cookie consent.
- csunbird 4y ago
  > That's because the alternative is for browsers to send a "I-WANT-TO-BE-TRACKED" header if users want tracking and then basically no-one would consent. I would say that, getting companies to convince the user that they would be better if they are tracked would be a good feature. Currently,tracking helps the company and hurts the customer, so companies should come up with a reason why tracking is actually good for the customer.
esperent 4y ago
That's intentional - it's malicious compliance from thousands of companies who really want to track you. They are following the law in a way that makes it as annoying as possible for the people whom the law protects.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

I thought they answered their perceived flaw quite well though! sounds like it’s trivial to add privacy to the popup block, so I’m all for it

berdario 4y ago

Yeah, but if you're not aware of this gotcha, the extension takes the choice away from you. It's good that the parent post highlighted this issue. I don't care a lot about cookies, but if a website is abusive enough that they need to ask for my permission, I prefer to deny it rather than give them a blanket approval (again: what I really care about is wasteful and overbearing JavaScript code that complements tracking via cookie... If I cannot object to that, at least let me object to cookies used for tracking) Again: you don't need permission for necessary cookies. The fact that the cookie prompt is annoying/difficult to parse and requires opt-out instead of opt-in is against the spirit (and possibly the letter) of the law. If our automation around the cookie prompt is accidentally giving an implicit consent, we ended up doing exactly what the people that push pervasive tracking wanted. We end up rewarding, instead of punishing, people who implemented dark patterns.

mustyoshi 4y ago
> I don't care a lot about cookies, but if a website is abusive enough that they need to ask for my permission How do you tell the difference? > Again: you don't need permission for necessary cookies. Usually it's better to ask forgiveness than permission, but I can understand sites wanting to play it safe and throw up a banner even if they only have "legal" cookies.
pessimizer 4y ago
The extension is far more useful if you block all cookies by default and whitelist the domains you allow to set them, like me. When you do that, every time you visit a site, sometimes even every time you load a page on a site, you get a cookie pop-up. They should pair it with a "yes, I am an adult" extension.
CephalopodMD 4y ago
I mean, it's kinda in the title of the extension. If you install this extension, it's very obvious that you're okay with cookies... If you wanted that choice, you wouldn't install the extension. I don't understand why this would be an issue.