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xp84yesterday at 7:27 PM3 repliesview on HN

It literally does not matter what you pick on these things - most of them don't work anyway. Think about it: Of course they don't. All the third-party javascript is already on the page. Anything you do inside the sandbox with UI provided by, usually, some other third-party, can't just magically force all that other code to behave in a specific way, unless someone has done a great deal of work to integrate the cookie banner code. If the first-party site were that competent at instrumenting every bit of third-party code the marketing department threw at the website department, they wouldn't even need the third-party cookie banner vendor in the first place.

Clicking those "REJECT!" buttons might make you feel empowered, but it's pointless. Just set your browser to delete all the cookies at the end of the session except for whatever sites you want to allow to 'remember' you.

The whole thing has always been a problem to be properly solved by the browser, and it's probably just the fact that Google makes the only browser that matters, that it's been foisted upon every website owner, who mostly just wants basic analytics and to track conversions from the ads they run, and isn't "selling your data."

The browser is your user agent. If it's sending any information up to web servers on every request that isn't okay with you, why are you using it?


Replies

gnatolfyesterday at 11:03 PM

Well, joke's on me: I use that extension too. And I never close my browser.

zugiyesterday at 8:28 PM

> Just set your browser to delete all the cookies at the end of the session except for whatever sites you want to allow to 'remember' you

Exactly. I use the "I don't care about cookies" extension, which rejects most cookies automatically without me having to see the popups. But even accepting cookies is fine - I'll be closing my browser soon anyway and they'll be gone.

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donaltroddynyesterday at 9:10 PM

I think you're right that many (most?) CMPs are broken, though usually not deliberately. Most try to gate analytics and ad tracking on consent, just often misconfigured. The common exception is companies that deliberately hide Reject All, which is not complaint

My company scanned 209 European regulated sites in June, and roughly 7 in 10 had tracking that wasn't correctly gated by consent. It's rarely indifference, though. DPOs in the EU hold too much weight for that. It's usually a tag added that was never wired into the CMP or something added by a dev or LLM without going through proper review

Full disclosure: I run https://consentmark.com, which measures what tags actually fire under each consent state to create evidence packs companies can show regulators