Tell HN: If I see an “accept cookies” on a website, I close it immediately
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m fed up with the state of the web today. Unfortunately, the law passed by the EU makes most websites show a banner about their cookie policy, sometimes taking up half the real estate on mobile screen. Sometimes they let you change your “cookie preferences” but often times the “essential” cookies radio button is grayed out.
So now I have decided to close any non-essential website that does this crap. For example, there was an article on HN today that linked to fleksy.com which showed a huge cookie banner on my phone. Between learning about how swipe key works (the content on their website) and saving myself from having to tap on small buttons to close the banner, I chose the latter.
I think if more people did that, websites would be forced to avoid using cookies in such a way that necessitates a cookie prompt.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 88.2 ms ] threadSometimes I can’t scroll and just close the site
Of course having to do this is hostile, but at least it's permanent.
Its very disappointing to see what was probably a worthwile initiative end up in laws that produce this and do little to nothing to address the original concerns.
At least it _should_ give you a change to click that "X" before being tracked, but that is doubtful too, and the fact that the web has become (yet) more annoying as a result isn't.
If the website doesn't support reader-view, it's hostile trash anyway in 99% of the time. And if the website does support reader-view, not using it is insane anyway. So using reader view essentially solves that problem.
That being said: since most powerusers bypass the warnings anyway through various means (like browser-extensions, content-filters etc.), the only consequence of your silent protest will be that you don't have access to that one website. Normal users don't even register the banners anymore, they just click the first button that makes the banner disappear.
(Edit: Or a shortcut to convert the current tab to a private browsing one.)
On my Iphone SE the banner frequently fill the whole screen and it's difficult to click consent or reject and even worse sometimes it is even impossible to click on any of those consent or reject buttons.
When I do take the time to think about it, it's generally in the form of being angry at that EU law, for training people the world over to click on prompts without thinking, and reducing the effectiveness of any other prompt for things that are more important.
The law could be changed/fully enforced to stop dark patterns(And the training effect), but we don't currently have replacements for all the things that would no doubt shut down if they actually stopped tracking.
If they want to actually stop the spying without disrupting the whole tech sector, they could be giving grants for people starting new FOSS donation-supported sites like Wikipedia and protonmail.
At present I get the impression the law is written with the idea that it's better to have no access to a certain service than to have a nonprivate service. If that keeps up we might not even have Tile trackers and doorbell cameras at all someday, because they might be just straight up banned.
I'd say a habit of clicking stuff without looking is far more dangerous than any amount of spyware, because tracking cookies don't steal credit cards and such, and I'm pretty sure most people consider ransomware worse than tracking.
Plus, it holds up the entire tech industry. If you can't trust users not to click every permission prompt, then a lot of features become impossible.
This topic comes up often here in HN and its always people suggesting reader-views/extensions and such to circumvent this nuisance. Which is entirely besides the point. I don't want to install some shady extensions, cure is worse than the disease.
My personal opinion is that the web had a "sweet spot" somewhere between the advent of pop-up blockers, and the death of flash (aka, the widespread adoption of javascript).
When flash was around, all the focus-grabbing/context-switching/interactive media was locked behind a click-to-play flash container that could easily be ignored.
Now that flash has been replaced with javascript (along with an expectation that everyone should allow it to run because "flash bad, javascript good"), we get unblockable pop-ups, cookie banners, unresponsive pages with content that refuses to load with the rest of the page, and countless other "features" that seem to be, at best, lateral moves.
If the site still doesn’t have a quick reject button (or a close X in the corner ) then I’ll consider who I’m giving this permission and if the content can be found elsewhere, I’m off.
2. ... anyway, solution which works for me quite well, if main browser does this shit start emacs, M-x eww RET and yank in your copied URL. This gets rid of a lot of crud.
I've got it set up so that sites not on an allowlist open in temporary containers. When the tab is closed, the container (and thus all cookies, local storage, etc) gets deleted 5 minutes later.
Sites on an allowlist get opened in persistent containers.
So I can always allow (at least some) cookies: if the site is on the allowlist I'll take the time to select the ones I want to allow, since they'll actually be persistent, but for every other site I can "allow all" and know they'll get deleted soon after I close the tab.
Hmm, I guess they would have to notice a big upswing in this behavior and then in deciding to test things say let's A/B test cookie warnings. Of course in order to test it they would have to turn off setting cookies because setting cookies and not displaying the warning would be illegal. So they would have to do some significant programming in order to test this, in a lot of cases.
But it seems unlikely that even if many people started following your example that the site operators would ever consider this was possibly the cause.
Perhaps if you developed an extension that when you clicked it would find some contact info on site, close the site, send info to site contact that behnamoh closed the tab at this time because of being met with cookie warning.