This might be just EU thing, but is there an effective way to deal with endless “accept/reject cookies” dialogues?

Regardless of the politics behind, I think we can all agree that current state of practice around these dialogues is …just awful.

Basically every site seems to use some sort of common middleware to create the actual dialogue and it’s rare case when they are actually useful and user friendly — or at least not trying to “get you”. At least for me, this leads to being more likely to look for “reject all” or even leave, even if my actual general preference is not that. I’ve just seen too many of them where clicking anything but “accept all” will lead to some sort of visual punishment.

Moreover, the fact that the dialogues are often once per domain, and by definition per-device and per-browser, they are just … darn … everywhere, all the frickin’ time.

Question: What strategy have you developed over time to deal with these annoying flies? Just “accept all” muscle memory? Plugins? Using just one site (lemmy.world, obviously) and nothing else? Something better?

Bonus, question (technical take): is there a perspective that this could be dealt on browser technical level? To me it smells like the kind of problem that could be solved in a similar way like language – ie. via HTTP headers that come from browser preferences.

  • Atemu
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    1 year ago

    Who the hell thought we’d want to get harassed on every site we visit?

    The sites’ operators.

    The GDPR does not mandate cookie banners. The GDPR mandates informed consent to processing of your data beyond what is technically necessary to facilitate the service. If all you’re doing is store session ids, user preferences or whatever, you need no cookie banner whatsoever.
    Lemmy also uses cookies. Do you see a banner? Me neither.

    Menial banners to “convince”/trick users into accepting severe privacy intrusions (cookies are the least of your concerns here) are an invention of the websites. Most of them aren’t even legal as they often do opt-out (straight up against what is written in the law) or use dark patterns to trick users into giving consent (obviously not actual consent).

    It’s taking a while but the law is slowly being enforced now. Expect slightly less terrible cookie banners in the future. Whenever you do see one though, blame the site operators and law enforcement, not the GDPR.