You wonder, why do they not just make it illegal to use cookies at all (other than for legitimate purposes like loggin in).
Who actually wants to accept?
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Also, require its html tag to have an attribute "data-legal-reject" or something like that so we can have browsers auto reject all that shit - while keeping necessary ones.
Better yet, attach this at the protocol level. "X-Cookie-Policy: ImportantOnly" or something like that.
Yeah, thereβs no reason why this should be anywhere except the browser level.
The irony made me exhale a burst of air from my nose before closing the page, never to return.
Basically every cookie acceptance agreement popup is just a 404 to me. No webpage has important enough information anymore for me to sign any kind of agreement. It's absurd. If you passed by a shop and wanted to go in and purchase something, but a clerk stopped you at the door and made you sign a fucking agreement that store would die in a month.
Can we ban the "Pay to have privacy" option as well.
Fuck every site that tries to pull that shit.
Whatever notions of privacy we used to have are all going to crumble as the newest AI tools come online for prying open people's profiles and predicting their behavior, their locations, their personal habits and spending, their health and family and relationship statuses, simply by analyzing a few patterns in your search terms and cookies.
From that information, these same monsters are going to be able to target you specifically with the kind of manipulative effort that previously would involve teams of people working around the clock to derive methods for influencing a single target. But it will be doing it on mass-scale, putting that same kind of effort into influencing millions and millions simultaneously.
And we all have vulnerabilities. The more invulnerable you think you are, the more likely you are to be subtly shifted by long-term, 3-dimensional tactics for changing the way you think and feel. Be it the way you think and feel about the latest flavor of PRIME energy drink, to how you think and feel about genocide.
We have to get off the fucking internet.
Pay or OK is banned.
It's not banned. Meta isn't allowed to use that option, because it has monopoly power. IE in the view of the court, you can't avoid using Meta. For any ordinary site, there is always the option to refuse either and leave.
The scope of this opinion is indeed limited to the implementation by large online platforms (which are defined for the purposes of this opinion)
We and our
908partners store and access personal data, like browsing data or unique identifiers, on your device.
Absolutely, we need a Reject All button!
And it should include this mysterious 'legitimate interest', or whatever it is called - always on by default in 'my choices', even though no one seems to be able to explain what this means. How can I make an informed consent on something that vague?
On the other hand, not 'Reject All', but 'Reject All except functionally necessary' (which should be precisely regulated by the law), otherwise there will be no cookie to remember our 'reject all' choice, which I am sure the corpos would happily use do discourage us from clicking that.
Okay, so I'm going to copy-paste an answer I got from someone I know who works in a legal department:
Basically, Legitimate Interest lets them track you as if you clicked Accept All, then subsequently they can decide if they think you would benefit from the tracking by their own metrics, which includes things like targeted advertisting which, of course, they do. So "Legitimite Interest" really means "Reject, But Actually Accept".
That is what I always suspected and why I take my time to uncheck all these.
Rejecting cookies without asking every time requires a cookie and that is clearly legitimate interest. The problem with legitimate interest is that it's not well defined enough and then you have companies claiming that Adsense personalization is an absolute necessity for their website.
But that would be cookie for the website I am visiting, not for a dozen of 'partners'. And these are the 'legitimate interest' on-by-default switches I am talking about.
That's were the ambiguity comes into play. The laws related to cookies want to allow things like cookies for fraud prevention and antibot protection, the problem starts when the business people say the personalised ad revenue makes it legitimate and the developers and product managers decide that having a bazillion trackers making their job a little easier makes it absolutely essential.
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The kind of stupid shit societies have to invest money in. Don't get me wrong, it's good news, it's just baffling that money had to be invested in order to get these bastards to do the civil thing.
'its baffling in a capitalist society, corporations do everything they can to squeeze the most money out of their users with zero regard for the users wants or needs, and do whatever they can to skirt legal obligations that protect consumer privacy and security'
Yeah. I'm baffled.
A disgusting behavior that I've seen in Spain is for websites to direct you to their subscription page if you say you don't want to be tracked, either you pay for the content or you don't get any content. Apparently the Spanish courts have deemed this legal.
If you use uBlock Origin, add the following rule:
* privacy-center.org * block
This kills 99 % of the "accept or pay" modals, an you can still access the page normally.
Make it opt-in where you must purposely click somewhere. And just hide that away where they have their unsubscribe button.
It is opt-in, if you don't choose any option on the banner it's the same as choosing reject all. So, the best option is uBlock Origin with the "Cookie notices" filters enabled.
afaik the wording of the gdpr says that rejection must be as easy as acceptance
Not just "as easy" but "at least as easy". The assumption should be that the user does not consent. And there have also been a few cases where the courts have - quite rightly - rules that "pay for privacy" offers aren't good enough.
i thought the pay or consent stuff was DMA though?
Cookie banners need to piss off forever. You may set some functional cookies only if I log in.
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I recently started to use "I still don't care about cookies". So far so good.
The issue about that extension is this:
When it's needed for the website to work properly, it will automatically accept the cookie policy for you (sometimes it will accept all and sometimes only necessary cookie categories, depending on what's easier to do).
It will often just accept the cookies as is.
This and Consent-o-matic
Heh
Heise Group, you greedy cocks.
Here's a version of that article that doesn't deliberately ~~break~~ skirt as far as legally possible EU privacy law: https://archive.ph/ZTt3K
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