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.

  • DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.caEnglish
    01·
    1 year ago

    Couldn’t agree more. I absolutely hate the half-assed job the EU did on this. Who the hell thought we’d want to get harassed on every site we visit?

    • 0xSim@fedia.io
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • netvor@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      My take: there’s many more user preferences (and always have been), that have effect on accessibility, usability and privacy. Cookie usage is just one of them, others are language, geolocation, dark/light theming, etc.

      Judging from user perspective, level of implementation of these preferences has historically been a holy mess. For example, for one of the oldest preferences, Language, sites would commonly just take them as nice-to-have, if not ignore it completely. Geolocation is a different story, it looks like the way things are set up, site just has to ask your browser for help so it’s harder to ignore it. Dark/light theming—I don’t actually know where we are but is seems it’s slowly getting better.

      Technically, I don’t see why data usage consent (cookies or not) could not be just another item in this list—in theory there must be better ways to deal with it than adding HTML dialogs.

      I don’t know if there’s some standardization process going on somewhere, but it looks like we need it. These things take massive amount of collaboration, which just won’t happen until the Mozilla’s and Google’s of the world are “forced” to.

      So I appreciate government bodies stepping into this in terms of simply mandating that (but not how) service providers must respect user preferences. Telling them how to do it on a technical level is another question and I can’t imagine anyone, let alone average regulatory body do this right on the first attempt.

    • ErwinLottemann@feddit.deEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      I don’t get why this is even needed. AFAIK the user can set sites that are not allowed to set cookies in the browser settings in chrome and Firefox at least. In theory this should work even better and more reliable than those damn popups.

        • ErwinLottemann@feddit.deEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I was talking about the way the law was made. Why does it require every site to implement a function that the browser already has and does better. They could have made it a requirement for browsers to inform the user about his possibility to block cookies from certain domains on the first launch, just like they made Microsoft to inform about other available browsers after the first startup of Windows XP (I think it was XP…).

          But there is something even better coming I heard - there will be the possibility to have a ‘trusted external service’ handle the cookie opt-in-and-out for the users. WHY?! It looks like these laws are made by people without any kind of understanding how any of this even works…