Cookie policy notifications have ruined user experience on the web

How ironic, websites have been breaking user experience for years by embedding always more trackers that took forever to load.<p>If a publisher doesn&#x27;t want to display a GDPR notification to its users there&#x27;s a simple trick : just don&#x27;t collect and monetize personal informations!

then there&#x27;s reddit and its giant full page ad for the app before finally redirecting me to the content once i find the tiny link to continue instead of opening the app store...<p>yes reddit and fb and gmail and the like are intentionally crippled when viewed on mobile. why? maybe because the data an app can suck up off your phone is much more valuable. no pesky same-origin policies!<p>i digress :(

We wouldn&#x27;t be having this discussion if cookies were opt-in rather than opt-out. I don&#x27;t sign into 90% of websites I visit, but why are all of them allowed to track me? If cookies were opt-in, then the legal issue of &quot;consent&quot; would be cleanly resolved, and the interface can be handled by the user agent rather than through obtrusive modals.

I&#x27;m a really big fan of geotargeting these notices only to the EU. If the EU wants cookie notices, give the EU cookie notices. Don&#x27;t give anyone else cookie notices, because they&#x27;re garish and few people reasonably care.

Are Cookie policy notifications a thing outside of the EU? I always assumed that websites geo target these notifications and life with the small risk of corner cases (like EU customer in the US). If anyone has experience, or numbers I’d find that highly interesting.<p>One datapoint from Germany: We were largely unaffected by cookie notifications before GDPR, because of a local law (TMG) that superseded the EU “cookie law”.<p>Since GDPR we are in the curious situation that every small and medium sized business plasters it’s website with extravagant opt-in notification pop-ups while the worst privacy offenders, like the nations largest newspapers, bombard you with all kinds of cookies with no notification at all.<p>Just one example I tried a few moments ago:<p>spiegel.de one of the most widely read German-language news sites set 54 cookies from lots of different domains plus local storage usage. No cookie notification whatsoever.<p>Another example: bundesregierung.de, the official government website, states in it’s privacy policy that they set a web analytics cookie (Matomo) but they don’t show a notification either.

HA, this made it to the front page right as I was composing this Ask HN submission about picking a de facto standard element CSS class so that ad blockers could just start including a simple rule to get rid of them: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17679932" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17679932</a>

Here is an idea: instead of a cookie policy notification, have a setting in the browser with the user&#x27;s cookie setting. That way a website can look at that setting and store cookies or not.

It would be cool if we could develop a protocol where users could flip a setting on their browser that tells every website they visit that the user has consciously, legally opted-in to all cookies. Heck, it would be cool to also have an option that says I accept all your Privacy Policies and Terms of Agreement, so don&#x27;t show me any banners related to those either.

Not just cookie policy notifs but all bottom or top aligned overlays present on page load... like the one on this reddit page begging me to install a mobile app so they can get my advertising id

What happens if you use cookies and don&#x27;t show any banner?<p>Does this also apply to localStorage and other offline storage methods?

I wish we could converge on a way to tag such notifications, so that those who want to can filter them out.

Do these notifications actually help with GDPR compliance or are they just a CYA for the websites?

I can&#x27;t count how many times i right clicked to hide element thanks to u block origin

works for most:<p><pre><code> javascript:(function()%7Bvoid([].forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll(&#x27;body *&#x27;),e=&gt;&#x2F;fixed|sticky&#x2F;.test(getComputedStyle(e).position)&amp;&amp;e.parentNode.removeChild(e)))%3Bdocument.body.style.overflow%3D&#x27;auto&#x27;%3Bdocument.body.style.height%3D&#x27;auto&#x27;%7D)()</code></pre>

They’re terrible. Who are we kidding, no one has backed out of the website after seeing one of these notices.