14 ms·

I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the

• PyWoody 7mo ago
  I remember when it first became widely known that the government could see your library checkouts. People protested. It was a big deal in my tiny town. I don't even think it would be even a blip on the radar now. It really is depressing how much ground we've given.
  • chneu 7mo ago
    I was just talking about this the other day. This all happened right after 9/11(nevr 4get) and people were fucking PISSED that the patriot act wanted to look at people's library histories. It was a HUGE deal where I lived. Now? Nobody gives a shit and people will trade away their valuable privacy for an IQ test.
    • huflungdung 7mo ago
      [dead]
  • Barbing 7mo ago
    USA PATRIOT Act, early 2000s?
  • 8organicbits 7mo ago
    Can you clarify what you mean? My local library is run by the county government, so of course the government can see the checkouts, they are the ones I check the book out from. But they restrict checkout information from others. For example, a parent can see the checkouts of their own children, but not after they turn 13. Perhaps you're talking about subpoenas? Checking some other libraries I see SF Public Library has some discussion about that, but they delete books from your checkout history once they are returned. https://sfpl.org/about-us/confidentiality-and-usa-patriot-act https://sfpl.org/about-us/confidentiality-and-usa-patriot-ac...
  • Cthulhu_ 7mo ago
    I mean in hindsight, how mental is it that you could look up people's names, addesses and phone numbers in public records? ...I mean I suppose you still can but still, it's not as obvious anymore and people's mobile phone numbers are unlisted by default and not publicly linked to an address..
  • paffdragon 7mo ago
    We also used to run spyware and adware scanner and removal tools, but now the ad/spyware rebranded and became mainstream...
• cm2187 7mo ago
  Accept the cookies and flush them out every time you close the browser. I think it would be naive anyway to assume that clicking no on a cookie banner would achieve much for your privacy.
  • bitmasher9 7mo ago
    Why even ask for the cookies if denying them doesn’t achieve much? It’s naive to think that cookies are the only tool used for tracking, but they are the most powerful tool for web based tracking.
    • N0isRESFe8GXmqR 7mo ago
      Because EU Cookie Law was a flawed idea?
      • OKRainbowKid 7mo ago
        How so? The law doesn't require cookie banners. However, you could argue that tracking/advertisement cookies should have been banned completely and that the law is flawed in that it allows for tracking given user "consent".
        • raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
          I love the EU apologists - “it wasn’t a bad law just because the outcome was bad”
          • GJim 7mo ago
            The alternative being to bend over and grab our ankles with both hands the moment the scummy ad-tech industry requests our data? Sorry mate, the GDPR is there for a bloody good reason; and legit companies obey the law.
            • raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
• rustyhancock 7mo ago
  There is a third path, Firefox focus. Accept everything, the end the session. That said even with throwaway relay emails I don't sign up to much
  • distances 7mo ago
    I use regular Firefox with the option to delete all data on quit. And I quit maybe once per day or so, as soon as I feel there are too many tabs open. Serves the same purpose.
• randomjoe2 7mo ago
  The fact that you think declining the cookies gets you privacy is the real grift. The fact that you think you're safe from tracking because of a cookie banner
• CafeRacer 7mo ago
  > It is the young people that are growing up conditioned to press accept There is a similar story with Ford and how they build pavement everywhere and taught the young population that roads are for cars. Now we have to drive for 10 minutes to get from one shop on the plaza to another shop on the different plaza.
  • bluGill 7mo ago
    It was the bikes who fought for pavement everywhere. Cars took it all over. Mud is annoying to walk it, but otherwise humans handle bare dirt just fine.
    • philwelch 7mo ago
      And horses actually do better on dirt than on pavement.
    • kjkjadksj 7mo ago
      Depending on where you live in the country mud is a certain default state.
    • jodrellblank 7mo ago
      The Romans built roads across Europe instead of mud paths two thousand years before bikes were invented. Humans might be able to cross dry compacted dirt, but do much better on engineered roads than on deep, wet, sticky, slippy mud, even before thinking about carts and wagons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads_in_Britannia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads_in_Britannia Unless you mean something else, but Paris was paving roads in the 1750s, a lifetime before even the hobby-horse Draisine was invented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macadam#Pierre-Marie-J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Tr%C3%A9saguet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macadam#Pierre-Marie-J%C3%A9r%... On that page it's mentioned that Macadam (predecessor to tarmac) was used in the USA in 1823 on a stretch of road of 10 miles which took stagecoaches 5 hours to pass in the winter before it was Macadamized, suggesting quite a desire for better roads a century before safety bicycles with chains were invented. Then 'History of the bicycle' says: "On the new macadam paved boulevards of Paris it was easy riding ... the "bone-shaker" enjoyed only a brief period of popularity in the United States, which ended by 1870. here is debate among bicycle historians about why it failed in the United States, but one explanation is that American road surfaces were much worse than European ones, and riding the machine on these roads was simply too difficult." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle#1860s_and_the_Michaux_%22Velocipede%22,_aka_%22Boneshaker%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle#1860s_a... Although apparently it was a thing in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement "The Good Roads Movement occurred in the United States between the late 1870s and the 1920s... a coalition between farmers' organizations groups and bicyclists' organizations .. Early organizers cited Europe where road construction and maintenance was supported by national and local governments."
• dubeye 7mo ago
  I'm pretty old and was the same as you for about five years, but now I just tick anything, much like the young adults. If they want my info, they can have it. I've not heard a convincing explanation why I, personally, should care
  • bluGill 7mo ago
    The problem is most of the time - perhaps all the time - you don't need to care. However you won't know about the exception until it is too late.
• bmacho 7mo ago
  It's not just cookies, it's explicit consent to track you, and sell your browsing history to ~1500 spy companies around the world. To the sibling comments: don't "accept the cookies" and then delete them. - - - I'm super angry at what the web has become, especially at the OS browser community. There is 0 browser (that I know of) that can access the web safely and conveniently. Atm I use Firefox with uBlock which blocks the cookie banners, but Firefox's extension model is broken, and every single extension provides 100% access to my websites to whoever controls the extension. I don't like it. We need a browser with a safe extension model. - - - edit: I guess using 2 Firefox profiles, one with uBlock and one with my google/facebook/bank/amazon/etc accounts solves the threat posed by uBlock and extensions. I still don't like it.
  • ambicapter 7mo ago
    How would you implement ability to arbitrarily block any network connection on any website without giving an extension 100% access?
    • bmacho 7mo ago
      > How would you implement ability to arbitrarily block any network connection on any website without giving an extension 100% access? Browsers should provide a filtering option before they makes a request. IMO a lot of no-brainer options are missing from personal computers. Like the ability to start a program with restricted access to files, network or OS calls (on Windows and on Linux). Browsers should provide the ability to inspect, and filter network access, run custom javascript on websites, etc.
      • jstanley 7mo ago
        We do sort of have that with the capabilities stuff (although I admit hardly anyone knows how to use it). But the tricky part is that "reading files" is done all the time in ways you might not think of as "reading files". For example loading dynamic libraries involves reading files. Making network connections involves reading files (resolv.conf, hosts). Formatting text for a specific locale involves reading files. Working out the timezone involves reading files. Even just echoing "hello" to the terminal involves reading files: $ strace echo hello 2>&1 | grep ^open openat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libselinux.so.1", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre2-8.so.0", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/proc/filesystems", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/proc/self/maps", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/lib/cargo/bin/coreutils/echo/en-US.ftl", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOTDIR (Not a directory)
• ge96 7mo ago
  I would go into source, delete the overlay, undo the scroll lock
  • TingPing 7mo ago
    You can just find adblocker rules for cookie banners.
• thewebguyd 7mo ago
  > It is the young people that are growing up conditioned to press accept It's really alarming, actually. I run the cyber security training & phishing simulations at my work, and it's the younger employees that struggle the most. It's like they just assume that everything on the web is trustworthy. It's not hard to see why though. They grew up with app stores & locked down devices. No concept of a file or file system, no concept of software outside of the curated store & webapps. People that never had to take responsibility for their own digital safety because "someone else" (Google, Apple) always did it for them.
  • darknavi 7mo ago
    Maybe we should make young learners in primary school use "infected" Windows XP so they can dodge spam popups and learn what and what not to click.
    • thewebguyd 7mo ago
      Growing up I had a "computing" class in high school. It's where I learned to type, but also learned the basics of using both macOS(9 at the time) and Windows. It was also drilled into me that the default state of anything on the internet is to be untrusted and potentially harmful. It also helped that you could actually tinker with things, and there were plenty of foot guns around to drill that lesson home. Somewhere along the way that message got lost and didn't get communicated to the young ones, and I'm not even that old (38).
    • whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
      They'd just click it away every time, when my nephew got a gaming laptop he'd play mindcraft and the windows sticky keys popup would be firing constantly must have seen him dismiss it 15 times before I offered to show him how to get rid of it.
      • whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
        Just remembered, even more distressing he first said "No it's ok" until I insisted it had to be solved if he wanted to game on it and could be easily solved.
• shadowgovt 7mo ago
  It's been done for about a generation or two, and that's what people don't seem to realize. In the early aughts I was sitting in on privacy discussions that reluctantly acknowledged that regardless of what we do online, surveys showed you could offer someone at the mall a free Snickers and they'd fill out the whole form. The perceived cost to the individual of divulging their personal data is near zero; dangling nearly any incentive in front of them will induce them to let it go. And that's not a new phenomenon.
• ZpJuUuNaQ5 7mo ago
  I do this, more or less, although I am a bit older. It's not as if I enter my real name, address, or email at every opportunity, but there is really no perceptible feedback loop that would force one to contemplate the consequences. I visit my local news site and the first thing I see is a massive cookie banner which lists over a thousand third-party vendors and asks me to either "Accept all", or if I am being prudent, click adjacent button called "Choose" to go to another page, then manually untick dozens of tracker categories, and then click "Allow selection". Whatever I chose, it wouldn't have any tangible impact on my life. I simply do not care.
  • nervysnail 7mo ago
    With uBlock Origin, you would not see such popups. Also, it may not have an impact on your life, but it sure as hell has an impact on adtech guys' pockets.
• varispeed 7mo ago
  I've been saying this for years. GDPR and Cookie Law were created for big corporations to legitimise data trade where before it was grey area. Now they get consent as people blindly click accept and they can make money. It was never about privacy.
  • gib444 7mo ago
    100 percent agreed
  • wao0uuno 7mo ago
    If it was about privacy they would simply make all tracking and profiling opt in.
• LiquidSky 7mo ago
  Does it even actually matter what you do? How many lawsuits/investigations have there been in the last decade revealing that some company or another that swore up and down was following privacy laws, protecting your data, and not selling it actually were. I'm at the point where I figure anyone who wants to track me is, and any privacy pop-ups or the like are just for show.
  • mason55 7mo ago
    Yeah it's really not worth my mental energy. Sometimes I take the time to reject tracking cookies. But I figure everyone's tracking me and everyone has my SSN at this point, and as long as my credit files are locked I don't really care. Like why do I even care if people are linking all my browsing data together and then using it to market stuff to me. FWIW I'm 43 and grew up on the dark parts of the internet.
• Fervicus 7mo ago
  People around me (including engineers) all casually use things like Alexa, Google Home, Ring, Nest, Chrome, are always signed into Google, have all sorts of apps installed on their phones, and have no problems giving up their phone numbers to services for verification. It's crazy.
  • raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    I bet you use an Android phone don’t you?
  • sib 7mo ago
    "Apps installed on their phones" "Use Chrome" "Crazy" Or, completely normal behavior. Are you suggesting that people should live in a shed in the woods like the Unabomber?
    • a_victorp 7mo ago
      Gotta love the slippery slope argument
  • theshackleford 7mo ago
    It's almost like not all "technical" people are the same, and in fact have different wants, needs, interests, tolerances and perspectives. Terrifying.
• dietr1ch 7mo ago
  People are getting brainwashed into giving away information on the web and real life. In the US it's not rare to link accounts through phone numbers that are required in web forms and store memberships. In Chile they started asking for your National Id with so many stupid pretexts that people got conditioned into just giving it away. It wasn't like this 10yrs ago. I'd rather have membership numbers. It's technically public information, so collecting Ids is legal, but it's also a universal primary key within the country that allows merging any user-related table you run into. Retail says it's just to associate it with receipts in case you need that later, but I'd rather just get a photo of the printed receipt for later than rely on them to find my receipt. Supermarkets, Drug stores, and petrol stations tie it to (possible) discounts or points at check-out, which is price discrimination and it's illegal, but we are in our way to get surge pricing as soon as the new US bootlicker president begins his period next week.
  • RGamma 7mo ago
    Giving out the Ids directly is stupid. Any sane scheme would use unlinkable attestation.
• raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  Again the HN bubble, I assure that the vast majority of adults of any age are not privacy conscious.
  • bookofjoe 7mo ago
    Spot on. 99+% of those reading/making these comments use an ad blocker; 99+% of non-techies like me never have and never will.
    • kjkjadksj 7mo ago
      Why would you never use an ad blocker? You like staring at billboards too?
      • bookofjoe 7mo ago
        Yes: some billboards are very entertaining!
  • bArray 7mo ago
    That was kind of the point.
• jameson 7mo ago
  Most doesn't event know what cookies too. In fact, most doesn't put extra thought into the things they are clicking/accepting on web.
• flurdy 7mo ago
  That all random game and messaging sites now wants my kids' passport uploaded to some random 'id verification company' is madness. But now instead, my 11 year old's Roblox thinks she is 18 because she wore glasses in their age verification webcam tool. And it can't be changed unless she uploads a passport, which I will never allow. Please, gov.uk introduce a gov ID verification service? I could trust that, -ish, I have worked with public sector clients several times...
  • bArray 7mo ago
    > That all random game and messaging sites now wants my kids' passport uploaded to some random 'id verification company' is madness. This is truly crazy. Random companies interacting on this level with children is far from ideal. > Please, gov.uk introduce a gov ID verification service? I could trust that, -ish, I have worked with public sector clients several times... I don't like the idea of governments collecting this sort of data either.
• jameson 7mo ago
  Most doesn't event know what cookies too. In fact, most doesn't put extra thought into the things they are clicking/accepting on web. Because of this, I found it odd that the regulation allows displaying the accept cookies button. Instead, it should be rejecting cookies by default and a separate flow to accept tracking cookies (e.g. via account settings page)
  • _bypa 7mo ago
    Why not have all tracking disabled by default by law and have users opt in through Settings menus?
    • jameson 7mo ago
      That's exactly my point. Sorry about the poor wording
• jabroni_salad 7mo ago
  I doubt the average person even reads those. They are just "the thing you must click to get on with things". How many of those does a person even see in a day across all software and websites wanting to pop up with some garbage you do not care about?
• CivBase 7mo ago
  I'm sure many law professionals felt the same way when we started getting bombarded with EULAs.
• yehat 7mo ago
  "they"... sadly indeed the damage is done, but not by "them".
• cortesoft 7mo ago
  I am in my mid forties, been working as a professional software developer for over 20 years. I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. What “dark pattern cookie trick” are you worried about? I just can’t come up with a scenario where it will actually harm me in any way. All the examples I have heard are either completely implausible, don’t actually seem that bad to me, or are things that are trivially easy to do even without any cookies. Now, I am not going around giving my real email out to random sites, though, although even that doesn’t strike me as particularly dangerous. I already get infinite spam, and I am sure there are millions of other ways to get my email address… it is supposed to be something you give out, after all. I just don’t think it is something that is worth stressing out about and fighting against. Maybe I am actually naive, but I just have not yet been convinced I should actually care.
  • airstrike 7mo ago
    I'm worried about my browsing to be tracked across the entire internet for the purposes of marketers to "enrich" my profile... just to sell me more and to sell that data to third-parties who can make all sorts of decisions based on a made up story about who I am, my preferences, my values and whatnot. there's a reason I don't walk around naked either. it wouldn't hurt me, but I don't need that kind of exposure for no upside
    • caseyohara 7mo ago
      > third-parties who can make all sorts of decisions based on a made up story about who I am, my preferences, my values and whatnot You're going to be presented with ads and preyed on by marketing no matter what. The "made up story about who you are" is just even more imaginary the less they know about you. You'll simply be presented with less-targeted ads.
      • mixmastamyk 7mo ago
        Not the point, no one benefits by having an accurate (or non) dossier built on them, up for sale. The drawbacks may be infrequent and postponed but as history confirms, quite real.
• zulban 7mo ago
  I saw some research awhile ago that 60% of the time, "reject cookies" is ignored.
• this-is-why 7mo ago
  Have you noticed half the internet doesn’t work if you use a vpn? Even a good vpn? Even HN wont let you create an account with a vpn. The friction applied to preventing people from deploying privacy tactics is intense. I’m not sure how we can practically resist the privacy enshittification without abandoning the internet and its convenience entirely. I’m ready to go back to paper statements and visiting my bank and writing paper checks, but I don’t think GenZ is.
• sdevonoes 7mo ago
  I use chrome as “burn” browser (i only use it for non important things) and I have a dummy email that I use for signing up in everything non important as well. Perhaps this young adult was doing the same?
• phendrenad2 7mo ago
  Breaches will inevitably happen. And each time one does, it'll erode people's trust in this new world of zero-anonymity-allowed. Give it time.
• kelvinjps10 7mo ago
  I prefer to have a rule in ublock that blocks all cookies notices
• bigbuppo 7mo ago
  My inclination is to simply close the window as soon as there's a popup of any sort. If someone did that to you in public you would be within your right to punch them in their face as an act of self defense.
• pull_my_finger 7mo ago
  I use Cookie AutoDelete on Firefox and it's great. It works with Firefox Container Tabs (groups have their own cookie settings), and let's you greylist (allow cookies from a particular domain pattern until the tab is closed) or whitelist (always allow from the domain pattern). I set it up for my kids computers also. The default is to blacklist (cookies aren't set), and I can whitelist for particular sites where they need say persistent login. Definitely in 2026 kids should be getting tons of education in public school about how to safely browse the internet, both for personal data privacy and for safety against stalking, doxxing, grooming etc in the same way millenials were grilled about source checking internet resources like Wikipedia.
  • jim33442 7mo ago
    Also Firefox and Safari by default block 3p cookies everywhere, which is a significant step above Chrome
• CamouflagedKiwi 7mo ago
  Are those young people really doing the wrong thing by accepting? They are getting on and solving their problem, they have probably never had any personal harm done by "some weird dark-pattern cookie trickery". It's almost like forcing (almost) every website to add these cookie banners has desensitised people to what they're actually saying.
• dewey 7mo ago
  Accepting cookies vs. entering personal information are very different buckets for me. I just click "Accept all" on every cookie banner, life it too short to figure out which checkboxes and dark patterns I have to avoid on each site to not hand over some data...that is than later on just tracked in the backend ("server to server tracking"). Or sold by my credit card company, or tracked by me hovering over some video on YouTube. With the amount of data available unselecting some check boxes on a website just doesn't make a difference.
• muyuu 7mo ago
  i've caught a lot of heat in the UK where i live for my position on GDPR, which is that i completely reject it, because people seem to believe it's there to protect any rights if there's anything remotely good with GDPR is the requirement to companies to disclose known data breaches all the rest of it is a terrible idea and only serves to nag people and legitimise the darkest of patterns the regulation should be there to disallow companies from asking certain information, everything else regarding tracking is self-defeating as it's 1) seldom enforceable 2) hardly binding in any meaningful way 3) pushing people to concentrate their services where they have already surrendered their data 4) legitimising of dark patterns this new and blatant step towards digital id is a hill i intend to die on, I will not comply and I will do everything in my power so that others don't have to and are even punished for doing so
  • jodrellblank 7mo ago
    GDPR has very little to do with dark patterns, nag screens, or online tracking? > "all the rest of it is a terrible idea" Having a legal right to ask a company for a copy of all the data they have on you is terrible? Having a right to ask a company to correct errors in data about you, or delete data about you, that's terrible? A company having to tell you what they intend do with data about you and stick to it for the threat of a big fine, that's bad?
    • muyuu 7mo ago
      you didn't get to read all post did you there are bits, but the total package is cancer
      • jodrellblank 7mo ago
        yes I did read all your post. It seems to have incorrect claims. > "i completely reject it, because people seem to believe it's there to protect any rights" Under "Your rights" section on the UK government website you can see that it grants you rights, so people have good reason to believe that: https://www.gov.uk/data-protection https://www.gov.uk/data-protection How does it nag people? How does it legitimise dark patterns? What is in it regarding tracking? How does it push people to concentrate their services in a bad way? The GDPR is not just for websites, it's for all dealings with companies.
• zahlman 7mo ago
  > the young people that are growing up conditioned to How does the conditioning start? > not value their personal data Okay, but in practice how much do they do with it that isn't ad placements?
• seniortaco 7mo ago
  You know you can clear your cookies right?
• insane_dreamer 7mo ago
  It's not just young people. I think the above represents 98% of the people out there. We've collectively long ago crossed over from privacy to convenience, and there's no going back. You and some of us here on HN (myself included) are the outliers.
• t1234s 7mo ago
  Bingo
• procaryote 7mo ago
  You're still relying on sites fulfilling what they promise in a world where facebook has been blatantly violating gdpr from day one and enforcement just isn't happening Set your browser to block 3rd party cookies, add privacy badger and ublock origin. It will have more effect than clicking "reject" I click "don't send me mail" every time I buy something. Every place I buy from still sends me spam at some point. There are no negative repercussions for them beyond whatever infinitessimal thing me clicking the "report as spam" button does
• Pxtl 7mo ago
  The cookie dialog was a mistake -- this is something that should've been handled as a browser API. A standard dialog of "do you consent to cookies yes/no/functional-only" should be part of the HTTP headers. Same thing with age verification. My kids all have devices that are managed through parental systems like Google Family Link and Microsoft Family Safety. It would be straightforward to have a header for "user is an adult" or not, and to have a standard API for "this site is requesting metadata that you haven't said to automatically make available without permission. Do you want to send it? Y/N [ ]checkbox use this for all sites. The only time we should even be talking about full identity verification is on user-submitted content, and even then that should be up to the site (with the commensurate legal liability of hosting anonymous slop).
• stronglikedan 7mo ago
  I'm over "middle aged" and just accept everything as well. Same with email - who cares who has it when we have adequate filtering in this year of our lord. I've never had anything negative come of it, and I'll be surprised if anything ever does. Seems like a lot to worry about for nothing.
• shevy-java 7mo ago
  >Siting there I realized, we were not the real target. That is wrong. You definitely ARE the target too - perhaps not the primary one but you are part of the cohesive whole. Why would you think that Facebook sniffs for offline data about which doctors people visit? These are not accidents.
• mrmuagi 7mo ago
  I had the same realization when seeing some one open up the outlook inbox and seeing a huge advert banner on the right of their screen. I had been so accustomed to using an ad blocker I realized the average person is bombarded with so much attention theft.
• ljm 7mo ago
  It's not young people it's inpatient people. My mum was happy to browse the pirate bay and demonoid and all that, where all the adverts were massive throbbing cocks and hardcore porn lining the edges of the page, just so she could torrent the latest hidden object game. She became addicted to those games and it wasn't enough for me to give her credits to buy a few more of them, and because I was her son I was the tech support who had to help her unfuck her laptop after it got loaded up with another round of viruses. The internet has maliciously complied with most if not all regulation applied to it which is where the new mass of banners and interstitials come from but the ultimate effect is to just beat the user into submission. See the EU cookie mandate and GDPR for how badly that turned out in terms of UX (even though the accountability is well in force under the hood, so the bad UX compliance failed and those sites are just screwing themselves). In this way, Google was initially a hero but is now just another American Big Tech entity that is too big to fail and can do whatever it wants along with Meta and Amazon, and in fact now TikTok's US entity.
• gentleman11 7mo ago
  simple solution: go to a convenience store. Show your id, maybe 2 pieces. They frown, shrug, and give you an anonymous verification token, usable once (or maybe a set of 20), that you can then use to anonymously verify your age. Yeah, people will sell these tokens online, but that's not the end of the world. People have bought liquor for minors who sit around the corner from the liquor store since forever. It's still a reasonable comporomise
  • CivBase 7mo ago
    This is a perfectly reasonable solution if the problem really is child safety. But we all know it's not. There's money in surveilance and profiling.
• alliao 7mo ago
  sadly I'm one of those "knowledge worker" that aren't extraordinary enough to survive on my own so I have a job. And everyday when I try to login to my zero trust network my face is being scanned multiple times. And I feel the cold stare from the teenager me lol that dude would not approve such atrocity for sure. daily refresh of biometric data is just downright degrading...
• justsomehnguy 7mo ago
  I have no problems accepting the cookies - my browser cleans them every start. Surely I don't use the web based services which require a login everyday in my main main browser. But e-mail address is a hard pass, mostly on the amount of work than the anything else.
• jim33442 7mo ago
  The allow/reject button seems useless anyway. It's my browser allowing this, not the website. If I were worried about cookies, I'd disable them or clear at end of session.
• rmonvfer 7mo ago
  I’m 26, probably terminally online and a professional software engineer too and I just accept cookies every single time because it’s the lowest friction path to just get the banner out of the way. Too bad for those sites tho, because I use uBlock origin on the browser, whitelist cookies by site (all cookies are otherwise always blocked everywhere) and use an always-on VPN to route all my network traffic to my PiHole DNS server. Maybe it’s a little bit overkill but I set it all up once and only have to whitelist sites every once in a while so it’s not really an annoyance. Besides, I’m not 100% sure now but I’d say that just using uBlock is enough (if properly configured) to prevent cookie-based tracking so my setup is definitely over-engineered.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago
  "Siting[sic] there I realized, we were not the real target. It is the young people that are growing up conditioned to press accept, enter any details asked of them, and to not value their personal data." I have seen (young) parents who are more addicted to this sort of careless internet use than their kids It will take some years before the cycle is broken Future generations will not be conditioned the same as prior ones Perhaps "age verification" as a wake-up call could mark the beginning of the transition
• Cthulhu_ 7mo ago
  A bit late but in my recollection, this pattern started with Windows Vista asking for admin permission to do anything, like changing your background. Which in turn was borrowed from the `sudo` pattern which had been pretty normalized in Linux land over doing everything as `root`. Of course, I remember kneejerk-sudo-ing a lot.
• whatevaa 7mo ago
  They will track you irregardless of your choice and then get fined 2% of their income from that tracking if caught. Most EU fines to big companies are still unpaid. Either your trust website to not be shady, or not. That button click is not a formal agreement.
• paffdragon 7mo ago
  I often click accept, at least for site banners that get through ublock. But my browser blocks 3rd party cookies and then it clears all cookies on close (except for trusted sites). I also use private browsing for random sites where I dont bother rejecting cookies usually. I really think this cookie consent concept should have been a browser functionality, so I can make my default choice for all sites and be done with it.
• duxup 7mo ago
  The whole process is a hassle. I shouldn’t have to deal with leagal-ish agreements for every website I visit. The entire regulation bureaucratic and nonsensical to individuals.