8 ms·

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

• airstrike 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
• xXSLAYERXx 8mo ago
  Feel similarly. And to be honest, even when I do select decline all, I have little confidence that the function does what it says it does.
  • devin 8mo ago
    Yes, I do not have a lot of faith that "essential" cookies are always "essential" for example.
    • LPisGood 8mo ago
      Certainly advertising is essential to the business model.
    • sudoshred 8mo ago
      Essential is contextually defined by whoever implemented the that part of the front-end basically.
  • mixmastamyk 8mo ago
    Firefox has a setting to dump cookies on exit, which I use.
    • pocksuppet 8mo ago
      And there's Firefox Klar on Android. It forgets everything on exit. Some people call it a porn browser, but I've gotten used to it for general use when I don't need to log in somewhere.
      • prmoustache 8mo ago
        For those that wonder, Klar is Firefox Focus with telemtry disabled by default. It is available on german speaking countries due to trademark avoidance with the Focus magazine.
  • belorn 8mo ago
    This is how we should view all information we get from a company. If the product say organic, claim to be pure ingredients, recycled material, made in "COUNTRY", or any other claim, it is only just that. It is simply a claim that you as the customer has no way to verify.
• rincebrain 8mo ago
  I would imagine it's the GDPR "ACCEPT ALL COOKIES" in big font and then in very small low contrast text "select some cookies" or "reject cookies" that they were describing.
  • thewebguyd 8mo ago
    You're lucky to get a "reject" or "select some" button at all. Now I typically see "ACCEPT ALL COOKIES" or "Customize Preferences"
  • jamiecurle 8mo ago
    technically, it's the ePrivacy directive. GDPR requires the consent to process personal data and governs the data but the ePrivacy directive is the instrument that requires that god-damn-please-make-it-stop-banner.
• NewsaHackO 8mo ago
  I think he is referring to how some have an "Accept cookies" and a cookie's settings, but to reject cookies you have to open a separate dialog box. I agree, and I think it is so wild that people would give their actual email to random sites.
  • g-b-r 8mo ago
    Very few still have that, at least from Europe, and for those which do it's almost usually just a single additional step.
• 1shooner 8mo ago
  First of all, if you don't practice any tracking limitation, you're almost certainly giving additional parties (directly or otherwise) access to your personal information. This is marketing data brokerage, this is the whole ballgame. To your point about the actual harm, I've come to see it as a kind of ecological problem. Wasting energy and sending more trash to a landfill doesn't harm me individually, at least not immediately. But it does harm in aggregate, and it is probably directly related to other general harms, like overall health outcomes, efficiency, energy costs, etc. No, accepting cookies by itself may not do much to me, but the broader surveillance and attention economy that relies on such apathy certainly has.
  • cm2012 8mo ago
    The effect of that data is serving you better ads. Its not a big deal. Dystopian governments have way better sources of citizen data than anonymized ad exchanges. It basically just powers product discovery in a giant global marketplace.
    • gmerc 8mo ago
      I’m glad you mention this. From today https://www.404media.co/cbp-tapped-into-the-online-advertising-ecosystem-to-track-peoples-movements/ https://www.404media.co/cbp-tapped-into-the-online-advertisi...
      • cm2012 8mo ago
        This shows a really fascinating dynamic. In theory, the government doesn't need the ad exchanges which have very lossy information. They have access to the ISPs and cell service providers, etc, with a warrant. Dictatorships like China and Russia don't need ad network data to be police states, they just use the core phone, internet and computer data. But in this case, the US gov are using the insecure private data as a run-around to the warrant process. This is definitely unfortunate, and I think laws should be amended to prevent this workaround.
        • 8mo ago
• mijoharas 8mo ago
  I'm the same, (well, mid thirties, and over a decade) but I always click accept for cookies. The only times I've stopped, or tried to deny it is with the recent thing I've seen from some sites that say "accept cookies or pay money". I think that is scummy, and against what these regulations require, so I'll usually just close the site in that case. Oh and to address the point from the main article, I think I'm unfortunately beholden to more companies, but would strongly prefer to not verify my identity, because I have little to no trust in the companies to safeguard my actual personal data. (rather than inferred cookie tracking data, which they can have imo).
• autoexec 8mo ago
  > 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. the effort and cost to download an ad-blocker that automatically removes the prompt to accept/deny entirely is practically zero and the amount of clicks you'd save yourself would quickly exceed the clicks it took to install the blocker. > I just don’t think it is something that is worth stressing out about and fighting against. Maybe I am actually naive It seems like you are, but that's just how our brains work. We're very bad at judging long term and abstract risks, especially when the consequences and their connection to the cause are intentionally kept unclear. For example, when people's cars started collecting data on their driving habits and selling that data to insurance companies a lot of people saw their insurance rates go up, but none of the insurance companies said that it was because of the data collected from their cars. I'd be willing to bet the data being collected by tracking your browsing history has already been screwing you over in various aspects of your life, online and offline, but you won't be told when it happens or why.
  • fiddlerwoaroof 8mo ago
    > the effort and cost to download an ad-blocker that automatically removes the prompt to accept/deny entirely is practically zero It's only zero if you don't need to interact with sites that break when you're running an adblocker. I run an ad-blocker nearly continuously, but there are all sorts of sites where I have to disable it in order to use the actual functionality of the site (and these are frequently sites I _have_ to interact with).
  • bethekidyouwant 8mo ago
    this is definitely happening and for some reason, no one has any clear evidence on it. Conspiracy theories are gossip for men.
    • autoexec 8mo ago
      We have all kinds of evidence for it (for example, here's an article about the data sold to insurance companies https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv...) and we've had evidence for a very very long time (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/data-brokers-selling-personal-information-60-minutes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/data-brokers-selling-personal-i...) The data collected about us online is extensively used against us both online and offline. The multi-billion dollar industry around collecting and selling every scrap of data about you and your personal life didn't spring up because nobody was making money from it.
• cluckindan 8mo ago
  Read the fine print. You’re usually not consenting to cookies, you’re consenting to having your data gathered, processed, enriched and sold by hundreds of companies around the world. One click usually gives random foreign corpos the right to your data across a multitude of platforms, the right to identify you across data sets, and to permanently link your device identifiers to you, for ”fraud detection” on a site which sells nothing. Clicking on accept or deny on those notices makes no real difference, since the ”partners” and ”vendors” usually enshrine their core data activities into the ”legitimate interest” category, which has no opt-out.
  • SJC_Hacker 8mo ago
    > Read the fine print. You’re usually not consenting to cookies, you’re consenting to having your data gathered, processed, enriched and sold by hundreds of companies around the world. They'll get it one way or another With IP tracking, you don't really need cookies much anymore
    • psychoslave 8mo ago
      IP is personal information, at least under GPDR in Europe. https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/ https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/
  • cortesoft 8mo ago
    Ok, so suppose I am consenting to all of those things. I still have the same question… how is my life going to be made worse by that happening?
    • cluckindan 8mo ago
      Are you saying ”I don’t have anything to hide”? All of your data starts affecting everything your data is used for. You may get worse rates for a mortgage, or not get one at all. You may be denied insurance or insurance claims. Cherry-picked details of your online activities may be used against you in a court of law, if you ever find yourself in one for any reason (think custody). These are the very mild examples from a somewhat functional society. In the other end of the spectrum, where societal breakdown is imminent, you have things like getting disappeared, thrown in a concentration camp, executed on your own front yard.
• bregma 8mo ago
  I like to just roll over and bite the pillow, click "accept all cookies" and let them go in dry and unprotected.
• WesolyKubeczek 8mo ago
  Which is why I installed the "Consent-o-matic" extension which dutifully denies everything for me, and I have uBlock Origin for everything else.
• KellyCriterion 8mo ago
  same experience here, but one exception: I just always the most left button, as this is usually "cancel" or "deny" - not alwys right,though :-D LOL
• getpokedagain 8mo ago
  I don't think you are being naive but I do caution you before you don't worry. Its not always clear what the desired outcome is here. The dark pattern could have nothing to do with the tracking most folks worry about. We like our phones more than our laptops because we touch the screens for example. The dark pattern here could simply be you use the site more because you do more actions there driving you to waste time and view ads. Who knows.
• g-b-r 8mo ago
  It seems crazy that no one stressed it yet: for the last few years refusing the cookies has been requiring EXACTLY the same effort as accepting them, for the wide majority of websites!!! It's disheartening that so many people still do this (and not accepting has rarely ever required enormous efforts, to begin with).
• manbash 8mo ago
  "software developer" is pretty broad. Here this is specifically B2C (business to customer) applications. I only assume that you haven't been in this market sector, otherwise you would've been more familiar with GDPR and all the concerns that prompted it. There was a time where the Internet was the wild west and you could've easily been personally targeted and exploited. Businesses sold your data to whoever. Even today, if you decide to accept all cookies, you're safer than what you used to be. Rejecting the non-essential cookies puts you in the safest spot from bad actors.
  • cortesoft 8mo ago
    I am familiar with the GDPR. We had to do a lot of research when it came out (as well as the California version, the CCPA, where I live), and had to make some changes to how we dealt with data. > There was a time where the Internet was the wild west and you could've easily been personally targeted and exploited. Businesses sold your data to whoever. Yes, I remember when the internet was a much more dangerous place, in all sorts of ways. Browsers were not as secure, network security was not very robust. Most things were plain text. Hell, my friends and I used to run ettercap in our college dorm, because the entire dorm LAN was unprotected from ARP spoofing. Everything was sent in plain text, we would capture email passwords, AIM passwords, etc. We would play pranks on each other where we would spoof AIM messages to different people pretending we were someone else on the dorm floor. I think some of the regulations have helped the internet be safer, but the tech is really what has changed.
• wao0uuno 8mo ago
  For me it's mostly a matter of principle. I'm against online tracking and I will do everything I can to not be monetized. Also clicking reject is not that difficult and if a website tries to make it difficult I just close the tab.
• makerofthings 8mo ago
  I don’t think there is much short term danger from the cookies. It’s more the principle of the thing. I hate the bullshit language of how we and our 1500 partners respect your privacy choices. They don’t respect anything and would sell their own grandmothers for a dollar.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• frshgts 8mo ago
  I recently spoke with an engineer who was building a product using the information he is able to acquire from these data brokers. This includes every search query you've ever made, anything you've purchased with a credit card, and anything that is in the public record (i.e. a pending divorce case, or child custody dispute). He uses that information to generate a profile on leads to determine how much they can squeeze from this person in whatever deal they are making. (I'm not going to get more specific than that.) This person had no incentive to lie to me about what they were building. The data trail you are creating is much more personal and invasive than you want to imagine, and in the wrong hands it could be used to devastating effect.
  • dangero 8mo ago
    Every search query you’ve ever made is not available from any data broker and if you hear otherwise someone is lying
  • citizenpaul 8mo ago
    This is the crux. What is happening is a system of complete information asymmetry is being created. it is not being created to help you in any way.
• downrightmike 8mo ago
  ublock it all away. ez pz
• fsflover 8mo ago
  > Maybe I am actually naive, but I just have not yet been convinced I should actually care. You are. Tracking is extremely dangerous to the society. Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue. The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less it'll take to get get you to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
• twhb 8mo ago
  Apply the same logical test to freedom of speech, and you’ll get the same result. You’re not missing anything about what’s likely to happen to you personally. What you’re missing is the manner in which rights shape your life and your society even when you don’t exercise them, and sometimes even when nobody is currently exercising them, and that significant harm can be built out of a vast number of smaller harms that aren’t individually that bad.
• gitpusher 8mo ago
  [Reject Optional], [Essential Cookies Only] ... I am one of the people who clicks such options. But to some degree they are "privacy theater". Any website that presents you with such a choice is almost certainly loaded to the gills with tracking/analytics and various 3rd-party services that will track you with browser fingerprinting regardless of any buttons you click on the cookie banner. Nevertheless I still reject them, mostly out of spite.
• dheera 8mo ago
  Meanwhile I just bounce from the site 60% of the time. Most websites aren't needed for my survival, and I hope they are happy that they lost a customer while I go to their competitor. Moral of the story is: If you want me to see your content, and maybe spend money, don't cover up your content. Especially if you're not EU-based and not subject to GDPR, stop listening to the laws of some foreign country that doesn't control you.
• kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
  You won't notice the effects, but allowing tracking feeds your behavioral profile into the data broker economy. You can then be targeted with things like dynamic pricing based on your guestimated income, invasive ads for significant life events, health care risk modeling, tracking your group affiliations, identity theft, and more.
  • slumberlust 8mo ago
    Unfortunately, NOT accepting them and actively blocking things also makes you extremely identifiable.
• avaika 8mo ago
  > 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 am fanatically following my rule "one email per website". Obviously, they all route to the same inbox. Initial motivation was to see who leaks my address and simply block it. However, the separation helped me out tremendously more than I ever expected (at the very least I believe so). I'm originally from a country with a highly oppressive regime. Years ago I signed up for financial support to a political opposition leader. Things weren't as bad and it felt safe enough at the time. They had my email, of course. Eventually opposition systems were compromised, and the full donor list became public. The regime's response: they cross-referenced it against emails registered on government services. For quite a few whose addresses matched, police officers paid a visit — looking for grounds to fine them, pressure them, etc. My alias for that site existed nowhere else. No match, no visit. Definitely an experience I was more than happy to avoid.
• II2II 8mo ago
  > I just have not yet been convinced I should actually care. I'm not out to convince you since my reasons are unlikely to apply to you. There are some of us who want privacy for privacy's sake. We respect the social boundaries of other people, and find those who don't respect our social boundaries creepy. We don't much care one way or the other if those people are out to exploit us or to harm us. It is the act itself that we consider violating.
• greatgib 8mo ago
  In a single given website, accepting cookies look innocuous. But to me, what is mind blowing, is when one day you accept the cookies on random e-commerce or review website about vacuum cleaner, and then later when you browse news or look at videos, there is suddenly a constant stream of advertisement for vacuum cleaners, everywhere.
• latentsea 8mo ago
  > I just can’t come up with a scenario where it will actually harm me in any way. "We kill people based on metadata"
• spl757 8mo ago
  Just as you have been programmed to do. Just because you are unable to percieve there is danger, does not negate the possibility that there is danger. And yes, you are being naive. Data brokers have a profile on you that contains billions of data points and they sell this information to anybody with the money to pay for it. It's designed to be easy and as unobtrusive as possible. It's a poor technical solution that has been exploited to help track you movements across all vectors, digital and real world. All the time, everywhere you go. Look up whether or not the city you live in hasd Flock cameras installed. Welcome to 1984. We aren't in kansas anymore.