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EDIT: I didn't realize the anger this would bring out of people. It was supposed to be a funny meme based on recent real-life situations I've encountered, not an attack on the EU.
I appreciate the effort of the EU cookie laws. The practice of them just doesn't live up to the theory of the law. Shady companies are always going to find a way to be shady.
Road to hell, good intentions and all that. Government fundamentally misunderstanding the role of cookies and the fact that browsers can handle user privacy with trivial effort by default rather than having every single website annoy the fuck out of you with a million goddamn notifications before actually showing you what you want to see.
The annoying popups are an act of malicious compliance from data harvesting companies. The tracking industry wants people to associate the right to privacy with stupid annoyance, so that people will stop demanding privacy.
The legislation does not say anything about cookies. It's about rights and responsibilities in data collection (no matter how it's done technically). The "consent" part of it exists as a compromise, because there has been heavy lobbying against the legislation.
This is not a technical problem — we've had many technologies for it, and the industry has sabotaged all of them. There was the P3P spec in 2002! It has been implemented in IE that had 90%+ market share back then. And Google has been actively exploiting a loophole in IE's implementation to bypass it and have unlimited tracking. Google has paid fines for actively subverting Safari's early anti-tracking measures. Then browsers tried DNT spec as the simplest possible opt-out, and even that has been totally rejected by the data harvesting industry. There are easy technical solutions, but there are also literally trillions of dollars at stake, and ad companies will viciously sabotage all of it.
I refuse to go to sites that do this, I also refuse to go to sites that block adblock...and specially the sites that detect and block private browsing, that one shouldn't even be a thing
Why the fuck would they prevent private browsing? I use that a lot to be sure the session is closed correctly.
There's lots of newspaper sites in the US, that do this. They'll be like "wanna use private browsing, make an account, or go visit from normal browsing." Idk why they do it but they do. Apparently there are discrepancies in the way browsers handle persistent storage features between private and non-private browsing that allow for detection
I'm pretty sure breaking your website with no cookies is against the rules, actually. It's either serve the EU with GDPR-compliance or GTFO entirely.
Yeah, you could still just break the law, but as usual there's a cost to that one way or the other.
Tons of companies break the cookie law already, but enforcement seems to be rare
Doesn't enforcement work by letting competitors sue you if you don't follow the rules for these things?
That's fine. People who don't care about cookies will accept them anyway and those who do care about cookies will know not to visit that site anymore.
Like I care. I've got a plugin that automatically accepts all cookies, and another one that deletes cookies when I leave the page.
Wait doesn't it automatically deny them?
The "I still don't care about Cookies" extension does not, no.
This extension can do that: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/
However, since many webpages have illegally made it so refusing consent is more difficult than giving 'consent', that extension is significantly more complex and in my experience doesn't work as reliably, unfortunately.
Is there any extension for android that can do that?
Well, you can install both of these add-ons via this workaround: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/
(I have used both. Both work. Although, again, I'd rather recommend I Still Don't Care About Cookies + Cookie Auto-Delete.)
However, Mozilla plans to make much more extensions available for Android soon, so you might see these regularly available before the end of the year. This is what we know for now: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/08/10/prepare-your-firefox-desktop-extension-for-the-upcoming-android-release/
Serious question: I know that there are tracking cookies and the user should be able to decline those,but most sites have an auth cookie that stores you're credentials. The devs can store it in a different place like local storage but thats really unsecured.what can the devs do in this situation when the user decline all cookies?
The eu rules are mostly about unnecessary cookies. Most web devs just copied whatever everyone else was doing and now there's this standard of having to accept cookies but the EU doesn't really enforce it like that
it's not up to the EU to enforce it.
not sure why you're downvoted. of course member states enforce it.
Any website that does that I just close the tab.
You should travel to Europe sometime and try to use the web
Yeah, it is great here.
Either the website is great and doesn't ask anything.
Or it asks for cookie consent, which you can decline in 1 click.
Or it pulls one of those "break the website" tricks which will get them sued sooner or later.
Or they block access to EU members, at which point you know they only exist to extract your data anyway.