8 ms·

Block cookie banners on Firefox

155 points by Perseids 3y ago

relyks 3y ago
Funny, I use the "I still don't care about cookies" extension (https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies) right now to automatically accept the cookie banners. They're literally one of the most annoying things that has happened in the web's history
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  I've used this extension for a long time, but there are actually websites like CNN that don't work with it now, because according to their lawyers they have to show that banner to everyone from the EU.
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    Do you have JavaScript enabled on that domain (CNN)? I use the NoScript extension as well as I Still Don't Care About Cookies, most JavaScripts are disabled (besides cnn.com and cnn.io), and I can read the articles just fine.
  - olivierduval 3y ago
    Or they could just not track people... ;-)
  - pridkett 3y ago
    There was a period back in December that this happened to me. I use a combination of ublock origin, no script, privacy badger, and Ghostery — along with PiHole and NextDNS. Yes, I know that’s probably a recipe for conflicting disaster, but like a lot of these temporary breakages, after about a week the problems with CNN disappeared. And I don’t think I did anything. But, I am US based too.
- echelon 3y ago
  It's funny we (EU, CCPA?) regulate cookies and hit use cases of companies trying to better themselves via analytics or maintain user presence, but we haven't done much in the way of stopping MAGMA from owning the means of communication and commerce outright. The Apple/Google duopoly on smartphones is insane. - Companies face 30% tax, can't deploy, can't do native (Apple) or get scare walls (Google), can't form a customer relationship, get ads sold against their brands, forced to use Apple/Google tech and adopt their upgrade cycles, no VMs/runtimes/plugins, etc. - Customers also have it bad: they're faced with planned obsolescence, no upgrades, encrypted parts ecosystem, green text FOMO. Apple/Google are owning all of payments, navigation, date/sex life, work calendars, emails, etc. etc. And they're not collecting data on us throughout all these activities? Or what about Google practically owning web discoverability by paying everyone off? Why don't we regulate smartphone vendors? This seems fair: - Web is first class. Users can download apps off of it without scare walls. - Apps can have native code, WASM, self-update, pack runtimes, etc. - Apps can use their own auth rails, payments rails, etc. - No limit on the types of apps. You can deploy non-Safari browsers and app stores of your own. - Search engine providers can't buy access to every single pane of glass. I'd argue that we should also regulate them on the basis of the power of their defaults, but we're in such a bind that I'd be fine with just the above.
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    SMS doesn’t work. It’s not just an issue of “green bubbles”. Texts don’t get sent. Group messages don’t work. Images can’t be sent. Videos can’t be sent. You can’t send on WiFi. It sucks.
  - Deukhoofd 3y ago
    Well, the Digital Markets Act basically regulates the things you're asking for. It's specifically designed to tackle "gatekeepers", such as the Google/Apply duopoly on smartphones, Metas hold on chat (especially in Europe, where WhatsApp is very popular), Amazons hold on the online marketplace, etc. It's a very new regulation, so we've yet to really see the effects.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    The EU is either cracking down on or actively investigating how to crack down on all of the things you mentioned. Cookies were just their warm-up phase. Actually, I'm sugarcoating things! The EU was cracking down on Android years before even the cookies. US techies genuinely thought EU antitrust was a shakedown to get money out of Google and have conveniently forgotten things since.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I always get downvoted for saying this but I think the cookie banners broke taboos about intrusive and annoying pop-ups in web sites. There was a time the tech and design oriented people could fight against it for the users but once it was required or maybe “socially positive” it got much harder to fight against all the others so you find the blogs now that will interrupt you three times to give your email and such. Cookie banners were the “broken window” that led to the whole car being demolished.
  - addicted 3y ago
    We’ve had far more annoying pop ups and banners since the 90s. One of Opera’s primary selling points at one time was its popup blocking capabilities and that was in the 90s or latest in the 2001/2002 timeframe from what I can remember.
    - halJordan 3y ago
      He's not saying that cookie banners were the first pop up. He's saying that you can delineate a before time and an after time that is delineated by the cookie banners. Before: pop ups were bad and browsers would advertise about how they defeated pop ups. After: pop ups are acceptable and you're bad if you want to defeat them.
      - PaulHoule 3y ago
        I remember the popup (e.g. new browser window) crisis circa 2000. Those were easy to stop because the behavior is easy for a browser to identify so browsers can't open popups if the action wasn't initiated by a user event handler and can open only so many in that condition. Banners, modal dialogs and other kinds of "new popups" in general are a bit tougher. Usually there is some element you could remove from the DOM tree or display: none but the trouble is knowing which element!
  - atomicfiredoll 3y ago
    There's been an overall progression toward intrusiveness for as long as commerce has been on the internet. We had "sign up for our newsletter" and other pop-ups way before GDPR. I think popup blockers turned back the tide for a while, but businesses eventually learned how to leverage dialogs for some of the same purposes. And, over time, that's been rolled up into WordPress plugins and other easy to implement solutions for one-off site owners, which makes them even more common.
- meowface 3y ago
  I just enable all of uBlock's cosmetic and "annoyances" lists. It seems to block them all.
- fsflover 3y ago
  > to automatically accept the cookie banners Do you mean it agrees to all the tracking or declines it?
- Hanschri 3y ago
  I can also recommend getting Consent-o-matic[0]. It automatically completes consent forms on most sites and denies all by default, although this is configurable. It is developed and maintained by the University of Aarhus in Denmark and is my opinion a better alternative to I don't care about cookies and similar extensions. It is also open source! [0]: https://consentomatic.au.dk/ https://consentomatic.au.dk/
gear54rus 3y ago
Any quick patches to apply to the source to enable this in all modes everywhere?:)
- graphe 3y ago
  Disable JavaScript works to block most problems or reader mode.
  - gear54rus 3y ago
    along with most of functionality, yeah, no
    - chrismorgan 3y ago
      Most content websites work completely fine with JS disabled. There’s a certain sort of startup landing page that’s very commonly broken, but on general content pages it’s definitely uncommon. Though blank pages still aren’t as rare as they should be. Source: I’ve disabled JS by default for I think three years now, and hold that it generally improves the web. My technique is to disable JS via uMatrix, but don’t enable that extension in Private Browsing windows, and so just open briefly in Private Browsing if a page that I want to see is broken. I find this a pretty decent balance for ease of use.
      - gear54rus 3y ago
        It does not improve anything. The web is apps now, denying that is silly. I don't want to reload the page with each search or action in gmail. Neither do I want to download telegram or whatsapp if they can be used as a browser tab.
        chrismorgan 3y ago
        I clearly spoke of content websites. I’m not suggesting disabling JS for web apps. You can easily enable or disable for specific sites with extensions like uMatrix and NoScript.
aeraea 3y ago
[dead]
Xenoamorphous 3y ago
How do they make it work across all websites, since it seems there’s many ad hoc implementations?
- aeraea 3y ago
  [dead]
- NeoTar 3y ago
  They haven’t. > “The cookie banner blocker works by using a careful selection of websites that we've put together.”
gigatexal 3y ago
This is awesome! Maybe 2024 will be the year of Firefox
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
> For example, they might make the Accept All Cookies button prominent, colorful and appealing, while burying the Customize Settings option in small text or a less noticeable location. This design choice can be misleading, effectively nudging users towards accepting all cookies without considering the consequences. Kind of burying the lede there that this isn't just annoying, it's illegal.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  The general trend of Not-A-Button Buttons in GUIs can die in a fucking fire. We have screens capable of rendering 8K in literally billions of colors and the silicon to drive them and yet we can't spare a few pixels for some borders and shading?
  - NekkoDroid 3y ago
    It's not that they can't, it's that they don't want to specifically to be annoying.
- halJordan 3y ago
  I recently went to a webpage that on landing it opened the cookie modal full page with a big "We Respect Your Privacy!" and all the cookies were listed and opted out. Which was really nice, then you scroll down to reveal the buttons and the big prominent button was "Accept All Cookies" and the other smaller button was the "Save Settings" button. They were all colors that blended so if you were going too fast you just wouldn't see the words against the background. I was really just impressed by the lengths they went to to steal consent.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  However, the various DPAs have been completely useless at actually enforcing its regulation, as if there wasn't actually any will to enforce it due to vested interests.
jszymborski 3y ago
uBlock Origin has a few lists for cookie banners that I always keep on [0][1] [0] https://github.com/easylist/easylist/tree/master/easylist_cookie https://github.com/easylist/easylist/tree/master/easylist_co... [1] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/tree/master/AnnoyancesFilter/Cookies/sections https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/tree/master/An...
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  I upvoted but wanted to say Thank You. This is very useful for me personally, and materially improves my life.
  - jszymborski 3y ago
    You're very welcome! The list maintainers and uBlock Origin folks really are amazing people.
jahabrewer 3y ago
[flagged]
benrutter 3y ago
Given browser headers have existed for a long time, does anyone know why there isn't some protocol of your browser saying "give me all the cookies", "give me only essential cookies" or "give me all cookies except trackibgbones" etc? Instead if tedious and manual banners on every website? I get why companies might not want this (less cookie acceptance) but they didn't want cookies to require consent either and the EU enforced that. How come no move to require support for a protocol like this?
- rusk 3y ago
  There are was a standard called P3P that would allow you to specify this kind of thing. However unsurprisingly for an industry driven by surveillance economics making this kind of thing doesn’t get that much traction unless you do things like GDPR. If think I heard somewhere that there is an amendment on the way to address this kind of thing.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    P3P died when Google started intentionally breaking it. > P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a... for more info." https://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/02/20/2127250/microsoft-accuses-google-of-violating-internet-explorers-privacy-settings https://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/02/20/2127250/microsoft-a... https://web.archive.org/web/20120220235443/http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/02/20/google-bypassing-user-privacy-settings.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20120220235443/http://blogs.msdn...
- Symbiote 3y ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track, though this wasn't part of any regulations.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    Furthermore, despite Do Not Track being an obvious and strong indication of user intent, website owners want to hassle you anyway on the off chance you fallaciously "consent" from fatigue/accident/coercion/etc. It's like those business bros that just keep pushing after you say no (respecting boundaries is for suckers, amirite), but since it's in the automated digital world think of it as yet another "dark pattern" if you must. Every cookie banner is essentially the site giving a giant middle finger to the user, but the surveillance industry has been adept at getting users to uncritically attribute them to the existence of privacy regulation rather than their own shitty behaviors. Part of which is this continued myopic focus on "cookies" when modern privacy regulation functions independent of the specific tracking mechanisms.
wnevets 3y ago
The EU forcing this garbage is one of the worst things to happen to the web.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  The EU didn't actually force cookie banners; they're not the only route to GDPR compliance. The other routes - like only using necessary cookies - were just unacceptable to ad/tracking companies.
  - bennyp101 3y ago
    Cookie consent banners and GDPR are different things though - it just happens that GDPR also classifies cookies as identifiers.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    "The EU didn't force cookie banners, they just made it so that companies have to choose between the banners and their revenue, conversion tracking, and business metrics." Whoever's bright idea that forcing an annoying banner on users was going to make any company currently employing tracking think even for a microsecond about not tracking needs to have their head examined. Because you employ tracking you're legally obligated to make someone else's life more annoying is a brilliant piece of legislation.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      > "The EU didn't force cookie banners, they just made it so that companies have to choose between the banners and their revenue, conversion tracking, and business metrics." You don't have to choose between those. Revenue tracking is clearly necessary; `SUM(total) FROM orders` hardly violates the GDPR. Conversion tracking can be done in an anonymized fashion, or via things like coupon codes. Plenty of business metrics left to go on. The EU correctly decided the balance of things was too far in the corporate direction versus the consumer direction.
  - wnevets 3y ago
    > they're not the only route to GDPR compliance. But if it was the easiest and cheapest. Their lack of basic foresight is painful and has made the web worse.
tyingq 3y ago
It would be interesting to know the rough amount of cumulative wasted joules on both the computer side and humans doing the extra clicks this cookie banner nonsense adds up to. Unintended consequences of laws.
eatbitseveryday 3y ago
How can this work "for German users"? Why is this not a "for a Firefox user"? I am German - how do I know this is enabled for me? I do not live in Germany.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Firefox periodically dials home and reconfigures itself based on the arbitrary whims of Mozilla. It's really kind of disgusting.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    For those interested, the mothership is: incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org I'm fairly certain the telemetry can be disabled, but it is enabled by default and it's among the top 10 most blocked addresses in my Pi-Hole. Frankly, I'm weighing the benefits to cost ratio of just blacklisting all Mozilla domains if this gets worse.
    - jimbobthrowawy 3y ago
      Telemetry and "studies" are both checkboxes in the privacy section of firefox's preferences. I usually turn both off right after changing the default search engine and disabling search suggestions, when I setup a new install.
      - marginalia_nu 3y ago
        Turns out this only turns off some of the telemetry. Turning it off completely is not entirely trivial. https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Data-Collection https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Dat...
        Dalewyn 3y ago
        Mozilla claiming to be the champions of privacy (among other virtues) makes this arguably worse than Google, Microsoft, et al. because they're at least upfront about their telemetry.
monetus 3y ago
This has been working in the DDG browser for me for awhile, nice to see Firefox catch up.
kmfrk 3y ago
Highly recommend the Consent-O-Matic extension to automatically handle cookie prompts, too: https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic. One of my favourite extensions.
- pentagrama 3y ago
  Seconded this, and on Firefox, the extension is also available on Firefox Android now https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...
emersion 3y ago
To show the setting to enable this feature outside of Germany, go to about:config and flip cookiebanners.ui.desktop.enabled. Then a "Cookie Banner Blocker" section should appear in the Firefox settings. It seems like cookiebanners.service.mode=1 might enable it outside of private browsing.
dang 3y ago
Submitted title was "Firefox private mode now automatically blocks cookie banners for German users". Submitters: If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... This is in the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
thrdbndndn 3y ago
I honestly don't like this idea. I hate cookie banners just like anyone else, and use addons to remove them. But I don't think it's browsers' job to modify web content based on their discretion, even with good intentions. I especially hate it when a manually crafted list is involved (as said in the article). I think it should be done of 3rd-party addons/rules, not the browser vendor.
- halJordan 3y ago
  I had the same thought until I remembered that i use the pop up blocker from the same browser. It's really not different. Pop ups are valid html/js that we depend on the browser disrespecting, so are third party cookies.
switch007 3y ago
It’s such a convenient outcome that the banners annoy people in to giving /explicit/ consent (every non techie user I’ve observed just click “accept”, oath of least resistance), when before it was a quite a grey area, as I understand it, that you have to wonder if it’s more than just a happy coincidence.
M95D 3y ago
Injects fake cookies that tells websites you previously declined to accept cookies, or do a JS-auto-click on the button. Now, how about letting plugins rewrite HTML while it downloads, so we can regex-out EVERYTHING except actual page content?

155 points by Perseids 3y ago

Funny, I use the "I still don't care about cookies" extension (https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies) right now to automatically accept the cookie banners. They're literally one of the most annoying things that has happened in the web's history

amadeuspagel 3y ago
I've used this extension for a long time, but there are actually websites like CNN that don't work with it now, because according to their lawyers they have to show that banner to everyone from the EU.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  Do you have JavaScript enabled on that domain (CNN)? I use the NoScript extension as well as I Still Don't Care About Cookies, most JavaScripts are disabled (besides cnn.com and cnn.io), and I can read the articles just fine.
- olivierduval 3y ago
  Or they could just not track people... ;-)
- pridkett 3y ago
  There was a period back in December that this happened to me. I use a combination of ublock origin, no script, privacy badger, and Ghostery — along with PiHole and NextDNS. Yes, I know that’s probably a recipe for conflicting disaster, but like a lot of these temporary breakages, after about a week the problems with CNN disappeared. And I don’t think I did anything. But, I am US based too.
echelon 3y ago
It's funny we (EU, CCPA?) regulate cookies and hit use cases of companies trying to better themselves via analytics or maintain user presence, but we haven't done much in the way of stopping MAGMA from owning the means of communication and commerce outright. The Apple/Google duopoly on smartphones is insane. - Companies face 30% tax, can't deploy, can't do native (Apple) or get scare walls (Google), can't form a customer relationship, get ads sold against their brands, forced to use Apple/Google tech and adopt their upgrade cycles, no VMs/runtimes/plugins, etc. - Customers also have it bad: they're faced with planned obsolescence, no upgrades, encrypted parts ecosystem, green text FOMO. Apple/Google are owning all of payments, navigation, date/sex life, work calendars, emails, etc. etc. And they're not collecting data on us throughout all these activities? Or what about Google practically owning web discoverability by paying everyone off? Why don't we regulate smartphone vendors? This seems fair: - Web is first class. Users can download apps off of it without scare walls. - Apps can have native code, WASM, self-update, pack runtimes, etc. - Apps can use their own auth rails, payments rails, etc. - No limit on the types of apps. You can deploy non-Safari browsers and app stores of your own. - Search engine providers can't buy access to every single pane of glass. I'd argue that we should also regulate them on the basis of the power of their defaults, but we're in such a bind that I'd be fine with just the above.
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  SMS doesn’t work. It’s not just an issue of “green bubbles”. Texts don’t get sent. Group messages don’t work. Images can’t be sent. Videos can’t be sent. You can’t send on WiFi. It sucks.
- Deukhoofd 3y ago
  Well, the Digital Markets Act basically regulates the things you're asking for. It's specifically designed to tackle "gatekeepers", such as the Google/Apply duopoly on smartphones, Metas hold on chat (especially in Europe, where WhatsApp is very popular), Amazons hold on the online marketplace, etc. It's a very new regulation, so we've yet to really see the effects.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  The EU is either cracking down on or actively investigating how to crack down on all of the things you mentioned. Cookies were just their warm-up phase. Actually, I'm sugarcoating things! The EU was cracking down on Android years before even the cookies. US techies genuinely thought EU antitrust was a shakedown to get money out of Google and have conveniently forgotten things since.
PaulHoule 3y ago
I always get downvoted for saying this but I think the cookie banners broke taboos about intrusive and annoying pop-ups in web sites. There was a time the tech and design oriented people could fight against it for the users but once it was required or maybe “socially positive” it got much harder to fight against all the others so you find the blogs now that will interrupt you three times to give your email and such. Cookie banners were the “broken window” that led to the whole car being demolished.
- addicted 3y ago
  We’ve had far more annoying pop ups and banners since the 90s. One of Opera’s primary selling points at one time was its popup blocking capabilities and that was in the 90s or latest in the 2001/2002 timeframe from what I can remember.
  - halJordan 3y ago
    He's not saying that cookie banners were the first pop up. He's saying that you can delineate a before time and an after time that is delineated by the cookie banners. Before: pop ups were bad and browsers would advertise about how they defeated pop ups. After: pop ups are acceptable and you're bad if you want to defeat them.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      I remember the popup (e.g. new browser window) crisis circa 2000. Those were easy to stop because the behavior is easy for a browser to identify so browsers can't open popups if the action wasn't initiated by a user event handler and can open only so many in that condition. Banners, modal dialogs and other kinds of "new popups" in general are a bit tougher. Usually there is some element you could remove from the DOM tree or display: none but the trouble is knowing which element!
- atomicfiredoll 3y ago
  There's been an overall progression toward intrusiveness for as long as commerce has been on the internet. We had "sign up for our newsletter" and other pop-ups way before GDPR. I think popup blockers turned back the tide for a while, but businesses eventually learned how to leverage dialogs for some of the same purposes. And, over time, that's been rolled up into WordPress plugins and other easy to implement solutions for one-off site owners, which makes them even more common.
meowface 3y ago
I just enable all of uBlock's cosmetic and "annoyances" lists. It seems to block them all.
fsflover 3y ago
> to automatically accept the cookie banners Do you mean it agrees to all the tracking or declines it?
Hanschri 3y ago
I can also recommend getting Consent-o-matic[0]. It automatically completes consent forms on most sites and denies all by default, although this is configurable. It is developed and maintained by the University of Aarhus in Denmark and is my opinion a better alternative to I don't care about cookies and similar extensions. It is also open source! [0]: https://consentomatic.au.dk/ https://consentomatic.au.dk/

gear54rus 3y ago

Any quick patches to apply to the source to enable this in all modes everywhere?:)

graphe 3y ago
Disable JavaScript works to block most problems or reader mode.
- gear54rus 3y ago
  along with most of functionality, yeah, no
  - chrismorgan 3y ago
    Most content websites work completely fine with JS disabled. There’s a certain sort of startup landing page that’s very commonly broken, but on general content pages it’s definitely uncommon. Though blank pages still aren’t as rare as they should be. Source: I’ve disabled JS by default for I think three years now, and hold that it generally improves the web. My technique is to disable JS via uMatrix, but don’t enable that extension in Private Browsing windows, and so just open briefly in Private Browsing if a page that I want to see is broken. I find this a pretty decent balance for ease of use.
    - gear54rus 3y ago
      It does not improve anything. The web is apps now, denying that is silly. I don't want to reload the page with each search or action in gmail. Neither do I want to download telegram or whatsapp if they can be used as a browser tab.
      - chrismorgan 3y ago
        I clearly spoke of content websites. I’m not suggesting disabling JS for web apps. You can easily enable or disable for specific sites with extensions like uMatrix and NoScript.

aeraea 3y ago

[dead]

Xenoamorphous 3y ago

How do they make it work across all websites, since it seems there’s many ad hoc implementations?

aeraea 3y ago
[dead]
NeoTar 3y ago
They haven’t. > “The cookie banner blocker works by using a careful selection of websites that we've put together.”

gigatexal 3y ago

This is awesome! Maybe 2024 will be the year of Firefox

adhesive_wombat 3y ago

> For example, they might make the Accept All Cookies button prominent, colorful and appealing, while burying the Customize Settings option in small text or a less noticeable location. This design choice can be misleading, effectively nudging users towards accepting all cookies without considering the consequences. Kind of burying the lede there that this isn't just annoying, it's illegal.

Dalewyn 3y ago
The general trend of Not-A-Button Buttons in GUIs can die in a fucking fire. We have screens capable of rendering 8K in literally billions of colors and the silicon to drive them and yet we can't spare a few pixels for some borders and shading?
- NekkoDroid 3y ago
  It's not that they can't, it's that they don't want to specifically to be annoying.
halJordan 3y ago
I recently went to a webpage that on landing it opened the cookie modal full page with a big "We Respect Your Privacy!" and all the cookies were listed and opted out. Which was really nice, then you scroll down to reveal the buttons and the big prominent button was "Accept All Cookies" and the other smaller button was the "Save Settings" button. They were all colors that blended so if you were going too fast you just wouldn't see the words against the background. I was really just impressed by the lengths they went to to steal consent.
Nextgrid 3y ago
However, the various DPAs have been completely useless at actually enforcing its regulation, as if there wasn't actually any will to enforce it due to vested interests.

jszymborski 3y ago

uBlock Origin has a few lists for cookie banners that I always keep on [0][1] [0] https://github.com/easylist/easylist/tree/master/easylist_cookie https://github.com/easylist/easylist/tree/master/easylist_co... [1] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/tree/master/AnnoyancesFilter/Cookies/sections https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/tree/master/An...

local_crmdgeon 3y ago
I upvoted but wanted to say Thank You. This is very useful for me personally, and materially improves my life.
- jszymborski 3y ago
  You're very welcome! The list maintainers and uBlock Origin folks really are amazing people.

jahabrewer 3y ago

[flagged]

benrutter 3y ago

Given browser headers have existed for a long time, does anyone know why there isn't some protocol of your browser saying "give me all the cookies", "give me only essential cookies" or "give me all cookies except trackibgbones" etc? Instead if tedious and manual banners on every website? I get why companies might not want this (less cookie acceptance) but they didn't want cookies to require consent either and the EU enforced that. How come no move to require support for a protocol like this?

rusk 3y ago
There are was a standard called P3P that would allow you to specify this kind of thing. However unsurprisingly for an industry driven by surveillance economics making this kind of thing doesn’t get that much traction unless you do things like GDPR. If think I heard somewhere that there is an amendment on the way to address this kind of thing.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  P3P died when Google started intentionally breaking it. > P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a... for more info." https://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/02/20/2127250/microsoft-accuses-google-of-violating-internet-explorers-privacy-settings https://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/02/20/2127250/microsoft-a... https://web.archive.org/web/20120220235443/http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/02/20/google-bypassing-user-privacy-settings.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20120220235443/http://blogs.msdn...
Symbiote 3y ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track, though this wasn't part of any regulations.
- mindslight 3y ago
  Furthermore, despite Do Not Track being an obvious and strong indication of user intent, website owners want to hassle you anyway on the off chance you fallaciously "consent" from fatigue/accident/coercion/etc. It's like those business bros that just keep pushing after you say no (respecting boundaries is for suckers, amirite), but since it's in the automated digital world think of it as yet another "dark pattern" if you must. Every cookie banner is essentially the site giving a giant middle finger to the user, but the surveillance industry has been adept at getting users to uncritically attribute them to the existence of privacy regulation rather than their own shitty behaviors. Part of which is this continued myopic focus on "cookies" when modern privacy regulation functions independent of the specific tracking mechanisms.

wnevets 3y ago

The EU forcing this garbage is one of the worst things to happen to the web.

ceejayoz 3y ago
The EU didn't actually force cookie banners; they're not the only route to GDPR compliance. The other routes - like only using necessary cookies - were just unacceptable to ad/tracking companies.
- bennyp101 3y ago
  Cookie consent banners and GDPR are different things though - it just happens that GDPR also classifies cookies as identifiers.
- Spivak 3y ago
  "The EU didn't force cookie banners, they just made it so that companies have to choose between the banners and their revenue, conversion tracking, and business metrics." Whoever's bright idea that forcing an annoying banner on users was going to make any company currently employing tracking think even for a microsecond about not tracking needs to have their head examined. Because you employ tracking you're legally obligated to make someone else's life more annoying is a brilliant piece of legislation.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    > "The EU didn't force cookie banners, they just made it so that companies have to choose between the banners and their revenue, conversion tracking, and business metrics." You don't have to choose between those. Revenue tracking is clearly necessary; `SUM(total) FROM orders` hardly violates the GDPR. Conversion tracking can be done in an anonymized fashion, or via things like coupon codes. Plenty of business metrics left to go on. The EU correctly decided the balance of things was too far in the corporate direction versus the consumer direction.
- wnevets 3y ago
  > they're not the only route to GDPR compliance. But if it was the easiest and cheapest. Their lack of basic foresight is painful and has made the web worse.

tyingq 3y ago

It would be interesting to know the rough amount of cumulative wasted joules on both the computer side and humans doing the extra clicks this cookie banner nonsense adds up to. Unintended consequences of laws.

eatbitseveryday 3y ago

How can this work "for German users"? Why is this not a "for a Firefox user"? I am German - how do I know this is enabled for me? I do not live in Germany.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
Firefox periodically dials home and reconfigures itself based on the arbitrary whims of Mozilla. It's really kind of disgusting.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  For those interested, the mothership is: incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org I'm fairly certain the telemetry can be disabled, but it is enabled by default and it's among the top 10 most blocked addresses in my Pi-Hole. Frankly, I'm weighing the benefits to cost ratio of just blacklisting all Mozilla domains if this gets worse.
  - jimbobthrowawy 3y ago
    Telemetry and "studies" are both checkboxes in the privacy section of firefox's preferences. I usually turn both off right after changing the default search engine and disabling search suggestions, when I setup a new install.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Turns out this only turns off some of the telemetry. Turning it off completely is not entirely trivial. https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Data-Collection https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Dat...
      - Dalewyn 3y ago
        Mozilla claiming to be the champions of privacy (among other virtues) makes this arguably worse than Google, Microsoft, et al. because they're at least upfront about their telemetry.

monetus 3y ago

This has been working in the DDG browser for me for awhile, nice to see Firefox catch up.

kmfrk 3y ago

Highly recommend the Consent-O-Matic extension to automatically handle cookie prompts, too: https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic. One of my favourite extensions.

pentagrama 3y ago
Seconded this, and on Firefox, the extension is also available on Firefox Android now https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

emersion 3y ago

To show the setting to enable this feature outside of Germany, go to about:config and flip cookiebanners.ui.desktop.enabled. Then a "Cookie Banner Blocker" section should appear in the Firefox settings. It seems like cookiebanners.service.mode=1 might enable it outside of private browsing.

dang 3y ago

Submitted title was "Firefox private mode now automatically blocks cookie banners for German users". Submitters: If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... This is in the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

thrdbndndn 3y ago

I honestly don't like this idea. I hate cookie banners just like anyone else, and use addons to remove them. But I don't think it's browsers' job to modify web content based on their discretion, even with good intentions. I especially hate it when a manually crafted list is involved (as said in the article). I think it should be done of 3rd-party addons/rules, not the browser vendor.

halJordan 3y ago
I had the same thought until I remembered that i use the pop up blocker from the same browser. It's really not different. Pop ups are valid html/js that we depend on the browser disrespecting, so are third party cookies.

switch007 3y ago

It’s such a convenient outcome that the banners annoy people in to giving /explicit/ consent (every non techie user I’ve observed just click “accept”, oath of least resistance), when before it was a quite a grey area, as I understand it, that you have to wonder if it’s more than just a happy coincidence.

M95D 3y ago

Injects fake cookies that tells websites you previously declined to accept cookies, or do a JS-auto-click on the button. Now, how about letting plugins rewrite HTML while it downloads, so we can regex-out EVERYTHING except actual page content?