Comment by chrismorgan

"Accept all" always makes it go away immediately.

Some variant on "reject" takes more effort like 70% of the time. Which is on purpose, of course. The ones that aren't maliciously-complying have a "necessary only" button that insta-closes it, but tons pretend that you might want to allow some spying but not all of it and make you go through another screen if you don't just "accept all".

> To me, having a browser setting for cookies is the only sane way to handle this, it's surprising that this was not considered from the beginning.

Then it'd be possible to default it to "nope" (Firefox, and perhaps Safari, might do this) or to allow a "never, anywhere" setting the first time the question is asked, and malware and spyware vendors know that'd mean a much larger proportion of denials.

It literally does not matter what you pick on these things - most of them don't work anyway. Think about it: Of course they don't. All the third-party javascript is already on the page. Anything you do inside the sandbox with UI provided by, usually, some other third-party, can't just magically force all that other code to behave in a specific way, unless someone has done a great deal of work to integrate the cookie banner code. If the first-party site were that competent at instrumenting every bit of third-party code the marketing department threw at the website department, they wouldn't even need the third-party cookie banner vendor in the first place.

Clicking those "REJECT!" buttons might make you feel empowered, but it's pointless. Just set your browser to delete all the cookies at the end of the session except for whatever sites you want to allow to 'remember' you.

The whole thing has always been a problem to be properly solved by the browser, and it's probably just the fact that Google makes the only browser that matters, that it's been foisted upon every website owner, who mostly just wants basic analytics and to track conversions from the ads they run, and isn't "selling your data."

The browser is your user agent. If it's sending any information up to web servers on every request that isn't okay with you, why are you using it?

It's a nag-box that appears every time someone visits a new website. Of course people are going to click it away as fast as possible. In the few cases you repeatedly visit a website one might want to reconsider, but by then it's out of mind due to not being shown after giving consent.

It is known that warnings and pop-ups that show up almost all the time yield diminishing returns. I think it was named "normalization of deviation" by some folks in a blog a while ago, and I believe that name fits. If you get warned about missing https all the time, or that something might be dangerous (even though it does precisely what you want it to do), it will loose its effect by the time you actually need it.

You can argue this is malicious compliance, but if you want it to go away it would probably be easier to go for banning tracking and personalized ads altogether. Eliminate the reason for this behavior, so to speak.

> To me, having a browser setting for cookies is the only sane way to handle this, it's surprising that this was not considered from the beginning.

There is one. It's a DNT header. Knucklehead websites ignore it.

> But in many cases, you could just click "reject" and the banner would also disappear...

Oftentimes the reject flow is substantially more annoying than the accept flow. I click reject myself when it's an option, but I can absolutely understand how people might get conditioned to click accept when clicking reject might result in more popups.

I believe myself to be fairly well-informed, and usually accept the cookies, because I don’t foresee any potential harms, and it helps the people running the website. I am worried about many things like phishing and hacking/data leaks, but the valuable data isn’t cookie-related.

What harm are you worried about?

Well, the whole thing is theater anyway. It does not matter what you choose.

They will fingerprint you with or without cookies. They may or not try to honor your preferences, but their "partners" will not try, and by the time you see that banner, it's all out there.

"Accept" is the close button.

Most people reasonably assume that if they click Reject they won't get the page they're looking for.

"To me, having a browser setting for cookies is the only sane way to handle this, it's surprising that this was not considered from the beginning."

This is exactly what browsers did back the 90s, they asked about every single cookie.

Then browsers got configurable options to simply accept either all cookies, no cookies, or only first party cookies (excluding third party sites unrelated to the domain you visited).

For now well over 20 years I have disabled 3rd party cookies in all browsers I use, and only in a few cases overall did I need to make exemptions.

Usually when you hit reject it opens some insane modal with 5 million checkboxes. While accept always makes it go away fastest.

Well, you would be surprised how many people think that blocking cookies means "no or fewer ads", even people in IT. No tracking, of course, just means it will show less relevant ads, not fewer of them.

So I'm not onboard with the "just block everything by default" crowd. If you frame the question as "Would you like ads to be more relevant to you" instead of "Do you want to allow tracking" you probably get a very different answer from users.

I would like the cookie banner to be changed to a browser setting, but I also would like the option to allow some sites to show relevant ads to me.

The amount of sites that don’t persist rejecting feels very high, or it’s extremely painful when encountering. The cost of clicking reject is extreme if you have to do it on every page load as you navigate a site.

I run two plugins to just invisibly make them go away, I don't care, they are a waste of my time :)

People expect visiting a website to be read only or contained within a sandbox to not read other files on their computer which is correct. Most people just don’t care about tracking and want to get to the content.

There is also the fact that by rejecting, the cookie that remembers that preference expires after like a day, so you have to click that dumb banner almost every time you visit the site.

>This is a jaw-drop moment for me every single time I observe someone else using the web and quickly clicking "accept"

There's a mismatch between the velocity at which people visit sites and the time it takes to navigate the cookie particulars of each site.

And, we can dismiss this as people being uninformed or lazy but the reality it is that's actually not so unreasonable. Cookies are in some ways near the bottom of the list where privacy is concerned, given everything else from breaches to search dossiers to device finger-printing to mobile device location-tracking to the ubiquity of cameras in the real world, and on and on.

The idea that we're clawing back privacy in any meaningful sense by blocking a few cookies here and there is kind of quaint.

This happens when countless websites continue to do the illegal thing of making rejection take more effort than accepting, without being sued into oblivion for repeat offenders. Roughly 9 out of 10 websites today will be doing this illegal shit, and we are too timid to tear them down.

if ever there were a need for a small local ai plugin...

Because 90% don't even do anything? It turns out it's actually one of those really annoying problems to delay cookies which were supposed to be sent already in the HTTP request response until a user interaction has happened. And on a lot of pages, non technical people embed random 3rd party resources. And these 3rd party resources might claim to use only "technically necessary" cookies, but of course that's nonsense; I'm not visiting the 3rd party.

If only there was a short little text file that websites could use to keep track of the setting...

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Agreeing to terms and contracts without reading or at least skimming them is not responsible adult behavior and should not be used as a model for legislation, no matter how many people do it. I agree that we do have a culture where private law is not taken very seriously, and that's very unfortunate.

People do not have a right (morally speaking, not legally) to access or use a service (or a website) etc without having to read/agree to the terms (applies to analog and digital).

Just enforce the GPC header... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

In a way it is - or rather it wouldn’t t change anything if we added more features.

The default is “no”. Without explicit consent you can’t do a lot of things.

You can’t have a default yes, because how can you agree with consent but automatically to everything?

And if it’s a no, are you saying you can’t ask a user for permission to use their data for a specific purpose?

And if you can ask, that’s what we have right now.

If people really cared, they’d choose browsers that have better control, but that’s obviously not a priority for them. Why do you think this sort of thing should be regulated to suit your preferences when most people don’t seem to agree with you?

How to know if they actually read it? The signature implies that the contract has been read, understood, and accepted. I see no need for any alternative mechanism.

Session cookies do not require a banner.

if you're talking about cross site cookies, which are the big ones that require consent: no they don't!

So, what, have no regulations whatsoever then? What an absurd suggestion. It’s a cat and mouse game, sure, but that’s like saying “there was a security hole in the software, might as well give up on trying to secure it.”

> “I didn’t read it” can’t possibly be an excuse to avoid being bound by an agreement

Only engineers have trouble understanding this. It can be a reasonable defense, and it has successfully been used in courts of law many times. The law is not a machine that compiles text like code literally. Imagine someone who coerces a dying or sick person to sign an agreement they couldn’t possibly be in a reasonable state of mind to understand what they were doing -- the law can and does invalidate such “contracts”. That is the same principle behind age of consent laws. The law could theorerically (and does) invalidate “agreements” which no one is reasonably expected to read and understand.

It can and has been in many cases in many legal systems. For example, let’s say you walk into my store to buy a dish washer. I say ”here is an extended warranty that I will give you. Just sign” you sign it instead of reading 15 pages of boilerplate. In the end of the document it says you now owe me 10 billion dollars. Doubt I will be able to enforce it in most legal systems.

That argument has actually worked in some cases, especially when you need to click away to actually access the document. I assume it's why we see more and more examples where you need to scroll the full body of text in order to "agree".

Of you need a nonstandard contract then you need to provide proof that it was understood. These are not provided in a context where I would expect anyone reading it to have a lawyer to advise so they obviously don't understand it

> There’s a balance that needs to be carefully managed here. Yes, fairness to consumers is important. But you can’t destroy the incentive to produce value in so doing.

The value is derived from the people consuming the product. Placing the "incentive to produce value" above the people who presumably are the source of this value seems...misaligned.

I don’t see how we could possibly prove that the person who clicked “I agree” is still the person using the computer.

Or that any actual human is aware that an agreement was made (since an AI can find a checkbox nowadays or software can be configured to bypass it). One way to add balance could be to require people asking for contracts to actually treat them like real serious legal documents, show up for the signing, and figure out who they are making an agreement with.

But "its specifically engineered to ensure that nobody reads it" is a real argument

You could use Consent-O-Matic https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

It already pushes the correct "Reject" button for you on a lot of sites (not all; it works based on rule lists)

How cookie consent has been deployed by the data sponges is my go-to demonstration of malicious compliance.

>If someone does not read a contract or a legal agreement, before accepting or signing, it's on them

When was the last time you read an entire EULA before installing software?

I'm going to guess the time frame is somewhere around "never."

These are nuisance contracts designed to jade people with legalese while stealing their rights to things like class action and enforcing binding arbitration.

Standard contracts sounds like the way to go.