Comment by aliasxneo
3 years ago
> To website visitors: if you see a cookie banner, the site is asking permission to spy on you. If that concerns you, close the tab.
There was a recent ACM article on this. They found there was a large number of sites that don't actually ask permission for anything, they are simply informing you of the spying. Not surprisingly, the ones that did allow modifying cookies were all setup in a predatory fashion which discouraged the disabling of tracking.
The whole system is broke at the moment.
It’s because they’re allowed to use the word “cookies” for it.
If they were required to use specific wording, like for instance “injecting surveillance artefacts” people would probably care a bit more.
Not necessarily. The team that wrote the ACM article did a small user-test using various versions of the "disable cookie" banner. In all cases they concluded that the user was indeed aware of the negative impact of cookies, however, the need to just "get back to the content" often overruled that distaste.
Not surprisingly, the most effective banner they found was the one which had a single "disable all cookies" button. It was something like an 80% hit rate. So, people care, but not enough to dig into another prompt to uncheck a bunch of boxes. This is what the ACM writers referred to as predatory (abusing human nature).
Hardly. It's like the requests for administrative rights in Windows Vista, or the installers with many browser addon bars...
Nice idea in theory, but if it's too frequent the awareness will, at some point, just disappear.