this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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AssholeDesign

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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.

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If you click disagree, the site just doesn’t work at all. Instead, gadgethacks.com shows you this.

image

You know, normal sites make you accept the bare minimum that is required for the site to function, and give you an option to accept or reject all the tracking cancer and advertising plague.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This violates European GDPR. Maybe report it to a data protection authority if Gadget Hacks operates in the European Union.

I couldn't even call the About Us page without consenting to all cookies, so I don't know where they are located.

Anyway, I do not bother. It's a crap site for what I can see.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I loaded it up in Firefox Focus so I could accept cookies without it mattering (but it didn't ask for some reason)

Anyway the About page has nothing. But the Terms, and Privacy pages redirect to a company called TechnologyAdvice that this seems be a subsidiary of, and that one is in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I just go to another site. Any site that does this usually has the same information that can be found on several thousand other sites.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Yeah, I skipped that site entirely and found the relevant information elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (4 children)

In Spain most of news webs have been doing this more than a year. You can choose between accepting cookies or paying a monthly subscription to refuse cookies. They say that the EU law doesn't say that the option to refuse cookies has to be free, although Facebook was fined for doing exactly that recently. So, yeah...

In most of them what works is disabling JavaScript scripts execution.

[–] tja 3 points 1 day ago

Yes, but Facebook was fined because they are too big to avoid. Under the dma is I remember correctly, not the gdpr.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

I have an extension that lets me block sites from search results. Half the spanish news sites are blocked, because I'm tired of seeing an interesting result, clicking on it, not being able to refuse cookies and having to go back.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

It’s genuinely been infuriating. Typically, if a page asks me to accept cookies for their “1500 partners” i just decline it and block the site, but a lot of the Spanish news aggregates want 8€ a month before they let you view the page at all

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Oh it’s JavaScript again. Seems like that’s the root cause and solution to most web related problems these days.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

normal sites make you accept the bare minimum that is required for the site to function

I've seen plenty claim that the 500 trackers is basic functionality.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Hmm.. I should probably look into this a bit better next time I click “accept only necessary”. Who knows how many times that has happened to me as well. Do you use a specific plugin for keeping an eye on these things?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

The few sites just list the advertising slop as necessary but I'm in the US so we have no protection laws. I block the pop ups and set Firefox to block from not from visited sites and clean them out frequently. Not to mention DNS filtering, Privacy badger, and uBlock Origin (or adNausium).

Trying gadgethacks I get no popups and no blocked screen, checking the actuall cookies I have 2 from the website and none from anywhere I haven't been to. I also find using an user-agent spoofer and pretending to be a PS5 or a google webcrawler gets around a lot of things.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Browsers should start enabling deleting every data from any website other than explicitly allowed ones by default.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I've been using CAD (Cookie-AutoDelete) to do exactly that:
https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete

Edit: I'm well aware that FireFox/Chrome support this natively, but with this I can share my exclusion rules between browsers and devices, albeit with manual import/exports.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

On my iPhone, I use Firefox Focus as my default browser. It deletes all cookies after every session!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Firefox and Chromium do support what this extension does natively.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

White listing cookies is the way to go. Everything else just gets deleted after a few seconds.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Sadly this doesn't stop fingerprinting, though it does make it a bit more difficult.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

You can do that for sure in firefox, but it will break some sites, especially any that needs some kind of login or settings.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I see use for a plugin that would send out fake tracking cookies... Or maybe it shares all tracking cookies in a pool and then have the plugin receive and pass along random tracking cookies from others to just make the tracking data random and useless

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

What part of the site breaks for this? It didn't prompt me but then I remembered I have a blocker for third party cookies. No popup whatsoever for me.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The whole page just dont work, because he denied consent blocking 3rd party with ublock or so just removes them and doesnt deny or accept them. So it doesnt "block" you as the fallthrough for many pages are "Consented"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I turned my chrome setting off, deleted cookies from the last 24 hours and went back on and can't seem to replicate OPs results. I don't get prompted at all. I went on another site to see if somehow it was still chrome and got a cookie consent pop up on those sites but I wanted to see what parts of the site would break this way. I can't figure it out.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Could also be a location thing. If you’re in the US, the companies can legally stab you in the back and suck your blood, whereas in the EU they have to let me know what they’re up to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I’m using firefox focus when clicking unfamiliar links online, so it has no fancy plugins or anything like that. It asks for my consent, which I don’t give. Then, the site just tells me to sod off, if I don’t like their tracking cookies. Basically, none of the site is available to me.