So, this cookie alert on theverge.com is both refreshingly honest and depressingly disturbing
A cookie notice that seeks permission to share your details with "848 of our partners" and "actively scan device details for identification".
If trackers are disabled, some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you.
Oh, the horror! (Not that we'll be seeing ads anyway.)
"some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you" is what we in mathematical logic call a vacuous truth.
Back in the early 2000s, we were promised that the magic of ads online would be that they are always relevant and not terrible anymore. This is why the targeting and tracking was valid to do.
It never happened. Not for a moment.
That doesn't include the partners of their partners
I blame all these polyamorous relationships with barely any rules.
This is for legal reasons mostly. They don't think anyone reads this so they went for the most blunt and transparent language, which also gives them the most legal certainty. The banner is missing the reject all button though, which in Europe is seen as required by many of the privacy regulators.
It is.
How is it nonsense?
The EU law is that the reject all should be exactly as easy as the accept all button. 1 extra click, however minor of an inconvenience it is, is extra effort. And therefore strictly speaking in violation of the law.
Nothing will ever happen but it's valid criticism.
You underestimate people’s laziness and their burn out. An extra click to reject all is an extra click people won’t bother with. I literally used to go all the extra steps to reject these things, even when a reject all button was not provided. Plus I’ve found that sometimes the reject all button doesn’t actually reject all, and there are a few hidden settings still left to uncheck. It’s ridiculous. It should be 1 click, just like hitting accept is 1 click. The ease of use should be 1:1. I was getting burned out by those extra clicks and all that manual checking that took like 20s-2mins of my time. That adds up. All to read a single paragraph on some website? Bruh. Used to do this until I discovered ublock origin has settings that can be used to block cookie consent forms.
To you, one extra click is no big deal, like a paper cut of inconvenience. To me, it’s the thousandth papercut I’ve received. I am tired of it.
Big oof here. Maybe make sure you understand what you're talking about before criticizing others?
Why did you edit your comment? At least own it.
Like the cookie that stores the "Reject All the cookies" response for your next visit 😇
A question: What is preventing the site using one huge cookie for all purposes, thus preventing fully functional use of the site without also enabling all other forms of tracking?
Same thing that's preventing them from ignoring your choices or not offering them in the first place: nothing technical; it's all up to the legal system.
I'm not sure how sites generally do it, but from my web dev experience in the past, I wouldn't be surprised if it is actually implemented as one giant cookie. Iirc cookies are attached to domains and one domain can't access another's cookies. So if they are sharing the data on their end, I'd guess it is one big cookie. If they have their site set up to make the clients share the data themselves, I'd guess there's a cookie for each partner's domain.
It's even possible that the information is shared without using actual cookies at all, since data can be sent to servers using the http get request. If you see ? in the url, everything after that is a list of arguments and values... Though the entire URL (after the domain, which maps it to that server) is data and doesn't have to map to a directory structure and file on a server. Maybe this falls under the umbrella of "cookie" despite technically not being a cookie.
Or maybe it's a loophole where the legislation focused on just cookies and falls back to these methods. Probably not, because if it's done on the client side, it would be easy to detect by anyone who knows how to look. But who knows what's going on on the server side of things?
Edit: my knowledge here is dated and outside of my specializations, so consider this more technically informed speculation than necessarily applicable to how things generally work. I say this because I see another comment came in while I was writing this that contradicts mine about a giant cookie being technically possible. My own use of cookies was to store a session id so that php could find the data that was being stored server side that was necessary for site functionality (like storing logged in state, user id, and other internal stuff we don't want users being able to change by editing a cookie). They worked like maps iirc where you just give them key:value pairs, thus could store an arbitrary amount of data.
848 partners? Damn I hope y'all got tested.
Now name them all.
I think you actually usually can get them to list them all, never much interested, they're all going to be completely random names you never heard of, just so long as I can reject them all, that's all I care about, otherwise I have to browse a different website on principle.
I feel there's inflation over the word 'partners'
STD: site-transferred data
If the partner count is larger than the number of bananas I can imagine being in a bunch I decline cookies. If I can't disable performance or targeting cookies I decline cookies. These are my rules
til I can only imagine 0 bananas in a bunch
I switched to cookie allowlist, and manually add the sites I want to remember me. I don't want to play the cookie game anymore, period. The only reason they ask is because legally they have to, and even then they do the bare minimum and use dark patterns to make it as hard as possible to decline cookies.
No more cookies for anyone, should have used them responsibly in the first place.
I decline cookies.
I push away the plate and slap the butler
World’s nosiest polycule
They like to watch.
Yea because I want a news site to have my precise geolocation data.
Me: logs on to their website*
Them:
It's truly crazy how much our information gets shared these days and how long it lingers.
My house spent a few years as a rental. I still get mail from people who haven't lived here in over a decade (despite deliberate efforts to stop it).
My grandpa signed up for ever "store card" you can imagine to get all the deals and rewards programs. His landline virtually never stops ringing... On August 5th alone he got, no joke, 43 spam calls (I have his landline hooked up to Jolly Roger Telephone to try and filter some of this out and help him out, so I'm forming that statistic off of the emails from them).
It's completely ridiculous and all of it needs to stop.
Well. I appreciate the honesty.. I guess.
Don't worry bro, its just me and 2000 of my closest friends. Totally legit.
If you're referring to the US' Video Privacy Protection Act, it was passed only because it slightly embarrassed a Supreme Court nominee.
So for there to be half-decent online privacy laws in the US, first someone will have to leak Clarence Thomas' Pornhub search history or something like that.
Check out the Snowden movie. That's so much worse.
2 days and this post has fewer likes than number of companies that get your data for visiting the Verge. Holy crap, that's terrifying
Alternative if the first one doesn't tickle your fancy.
https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic
I'd like to see a cookie notice that just says "it's your browser, figure out how to get it to handle cookies however you want. If you accept cookies we're gonna use them and you can safely assume we'll use them for anything and everything they might be useful for. European regulators can eat a bag of dicks."
I'm on the verge.
I just occasionally wipe everything. I have to reenter passwords and such but it isn't a big deal.
We all have a fundamental right to privacy, which is constantly violated. Not just on a daily basis, but on a minute by minute basis.
But to play devil's advocate for a moment to assuage some FUD around posts like this, how many of the absurd amount of cookies overlap in otherwise innoculous ways. For instance, product tracking cookies. Say you bought a pumpkin on Amazon, and that drops a gorde cookie, a pumpkin spice cookie, a cornucopia cookie etc.
That's certainly not the same as buy a pumpkin, track your location around the nearest pumpkin patch, read your grandma's emails about pumpkins, and collect information to determine your likelihood of buying another pumpkin based on your sexual orientation.
The latter certainly exists, but does anyone know much about the former? How prevalent would they be in that 850?
And the EU has forced us to answer that goddamn "do you accept cookies?" question on every frigging website. How many people just click "accept all" to get on with things?
The EU has forced them to give us the option. Previously, they'd do all of that shit without telling you.
Previously I just opted out of all cookies as a browser setting.
ok to be honest i'd rather have the choice to accept or decline it and waste a couple seconds then having all of that enabled by default with no way to reject them
I have the ghosrtery extension on Firefox, I have it set to auto reject all tracking cookies, and reject all third party "legitimate interest" cookies. I've heard there's other extensions that do the same, and maybe better, but I already have it set the way I want.
THAT IS A BIG FAT LIE! The EU did not force any such thing. The EU simply said that people's data cannot be used without consent. This is the website asking for consent.
Website developers have a perfectly valid choice not to collect any data. They chose their profits above your privacy.
I have a website and I don't have a popup asking for consent, because I don't need to, because I don't collect any data.
Cookie Auto-Delete helps with that.
There's cookie lists in uBlock Origin. Just enable them.
Is it really so hard to copy and paste the text? Down voted. Don't do that again.
We and our 848 partners store and access personal data, like browsing data or unique identifiers, on your device. Selecting "I Accept" enables tracking technologies to support the purposes shown under "we and our partners process data to provide," whereas selecting "Reject All" or withdrawing your consent will disable them. If trackers are disabled, some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you. You can resurface this menu to change your choices or withdraw consent at any time by clicking the ["privacy preferences"] link on the bottom of the webpage [or the floating icon on the bottom-left of the webpage, if applicable]. Your choices will have effect within our Website. For more details, refer to our Privacy Policy. Cookie Policy. Ways we may use your data:
Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Develop and improve services. Create profiles to personalise content. Measure advertising performance. Use limited data to select advertising. Use limited data to select content. Use profiles to select personalised content. Create profiles for personalised advertising. Measure content performance. Use profiles to select personalised advertising. Understand audiences through statistics or combinations of data from different sources. Store and/or access information on a device.
List of Partners (vendors)
Is it really so hard to copy and paste the text look at the image? Down voted. Don't do that again.
Hate when they remove the reject all button
In the EU and UK this is also forbidden as rejecting should be as simple as accepting cookies.
In theory yes, in practice "uh-huh."
Bruh
The most effective solution is just to wipe all cookies every time you close your browser, or creating strict cookie whitelists. Actually managing cookies on webpages is for normies.
and then every time you visit that one good news site, you have to go through their cookie banner each time. That or install a cookie-denying addon and hope that they don't sellout or sell your data.
Still doesn't get rid of the popup, for that I use ublock origin.
No? If you accept tracking while on the page, this has consequences on your current session
Sounds like a job for the Mullvad browser, since that clears cookies on every restart by default.
Sadly that is not an option for firefox on android yet (while it is on desktop), the only choises you are left with are:
That said, i believe Firefox should have (even on android) their "total cookie protection" thing which puts them in separate containers for each domain, so you are somewhat protected by cookie cross-tracking, but i would still prefer to delete most of them at close.
Consent-o-matic browser extension can handle a lot of cookie banners and automatically rejects all possible cookies.
Reject all is actually you agreeing on the legitimate interests loophole so this is also problematic.
I used to rely on Consent-O-Matic a lot, but I'm somewhat uncomfortable by the fact that the extension has full access to all web page content. I mean I understand why, but I'm still uncomfortable with it. In the end I ended up uninstalling it because it broke some sites so that they wouldn't load at all, or got stuck into an infinite reload loop. On majority of cases it works alright though.
Oh alr thank you
I just implemented a cookie consent bar on my company's website and the agencies/vendors who advertise for us were giving me so much shit for having reject available right away. But thankfully our Legal department said keep it there... Or else. "Hands tied..... Soooooorry!"