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.
The EU did its job correctly by forcing sites to ask for consent. How that rule is implemented is up to the sites, and they often choose to do it in the most annoying possible way. And then tell you to blame the EU for it.
Also as a website owner, you only need to ask for consent when you use more than “strictly necessary” cookies (https://gdpr.eu/cookies/), i.e. cookies that are needed for your site to function normally.
The ruling has been updated to say that accepting cannot be more convenient/streamlined/less clicks than rejecting, though.
Getting that enforced is another matter altogether, however.
I just learned about the Do Not Track standard, which seems like a much better solution. Just tell your browser once that you don’t want to be tracked, and websites are required to respect that. Rather than each website implementing its own banner UI.
Unfortunately even when it’s built into your browser, some sites get around it. It’s definitely a much better idea than the half-assed mess though.
I blame the EU for not forcing implementation of Do Not Track standards. I will forever maintain that scraping of personal data of any kind should be opt-in, not opt-out. These people get paid a lot of money to get this right.
It is opt-in though? The site can’t track you until you agree with its cookies policy