A cookie notice that seeks permission to share your details with “848 of our partners” and “actively scan device details for identification”.
Remember when they passed laws protecting our library and video store rental histories instead of letting data brokers hoover up every song you listen to and every news article you read?
If you’re referring to the US’ Video Privacy Protection Act, it was passed only because it slightly embarrassed a Supreme Court nominee.
So for there to be half-decent online privacy laws in the US, first someone will have to leak Clarence Thomas’ Pornhub search history or something like that.
We all have a fundamental right to privacy, which is constantly violated. Not just on a daily basis, but on a minute by minute basis.
But to play devil’s advocate for a moment to assuage some FUD around posts like this, how many of the absurd amount of cookies overlap in otherwise innoculous ways. For instance, product tracking cookies. Say you bought a pumpkin on Amazon, and that drops a gorde cookie, a pumpkin spice cookie, a cornucopia cookie etc.
That’s certainly not the same as buy a pumpkin, track your location around the nearest pumpkin patch, read your grandma’s emails about pumpkins, and collect information to determine your likelihood of buying another pumpkin based on your sexual orientation.
The latter certainly exists, but does anyone know much about the former? How prevalent would they be in that 850?
If trackers are disabled, some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you.
Oh, the horror! (Not that we’ll be seeing ads anyway.)
“some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you” is what we in mathematical logic call a vacuous truth.
which part is the (false) antecedent, and which part is the statement?
If you’re looking for a never true anticedent reason that “some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you” is vacuous, that would work if they had an ad browser that was 100% effective on the site in question.
If you’re looking for a never true anticedent for “If trackers are disabled, some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you.”, it’s that you can’t disable all trackers with a cookie dialog because of the “necessary cookies” blanket exemption, the too many tick boxes to use “legitimate interest” loophole, and that most websites use “fingerprinting”, meaning they reference you not by your cookies but by the worryingly extensive information they get automatically about your browser’s version, settings, capabilities and features, and of course IP address. So it’s never true that trackers are never disabled.
What the Wikipedia article doesn’t explain well in my view, is that logically, “if A then B” means “B, or not A”. This is vacuously (emptily) true if B is always true or A is always false, because it’s not genuinely conditional at all.
So I suspect that they meant it was vacuous, not on the grounds that the anticedent could never be true, but that the consequent could never be false. Like “If you give me $10, the sun will rise tomorrow”. In this case, all they need to assert is that “some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you” is true irrespective of whether trackers are disabled, which is almost certainly what they meant.
I’m curious that the Wikipedia article says the base case in an induction is often vacuously true, but I think they mean trivially true, like cos(1x) + sin(1x) = (cos x + sin x)^1, not vacuously true. I couldn’t think of any induction proofs where the base case was literally vacuous except false ones used for teaching purposes, probably because I could only think of induction proofs of absolute rather than conditional ones. Probably there are mathematical fields where induction is used for conditional statements a lot that I’m forgetting.
In this case, all they need to assert is that “some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you” is true irrespective of whether trackers are disabled, which is almost certainly what they meant.
Ah I see. Thanks for the detailed writeup
Back in the early 2000s, we were promised that the magic of ads online would be that they are always relevant and not terrible anymore. This is why the targeting and tracking was valid to do.
It never happened. Not for a moment.
If the partner count is larger than the number of bananas I can imagine being in a bunch I decline cookies. If I can’t disable performance or targeting cookies I decline cookies. These are my rules
til I can only imagine 0 bananas in a bunch
I switched to cookie allowlist, and manually add the sites I want to remember me. I don’t want to play the cookie game anymore, period. The only reason they ask is because legally they have to, and even then they do the bare minimum and use dark patterns to make it as hard as possible to decline cookies.
No more cookies for anyone, should have used them responsibly in the first place.
I decline cookies.
I push away the plate and slap the butler
Check out the Snowden movie. That’s so much worse.
That doesn’t include the partners of their partners
I blame all these polyamorous relationships with barely any rules.
Is it really so hard to copy and paste the text? Down voted. Don’t do that again.
Is it really so hard to
copy and paste the textlook at the image? Down voted. Don’t do that again.is it really so hard to look at the image
Uuuuuuuh… Have you considered that there are people who have problems with their eyes or are outright blind?
Don’t be an ass again.
For blind peope, yes. Asshole. This is why we have rules against posting images of text.
There are nicer ways to say this.
“For the sightly impaired, indeed my good chum! Tis the crux of why we uphold our most sacred vows in the context of textual imagery.”
I’m colorblind for what it’s worth and I don’t go around yelling at people for making badly colored charts I can’t understand in the rudest way possible.
The image captures the web page design / the cookie banner, it’s more than “just the words” so for a non-blind person “just post the text” is actually arguably a downgrade.
I mean this is literally the purpose of alt text, so that you can share an image and its description (which in this case should contain all the text from the image) and screen readers can do their thing.
I actually didn’t realize their was support for alt-text. The clients I’ve used the few times when I’ve posted images … I don’t recall even prompting for alt text.
But you should, since there are accessibility rules against low contrast.
Just because there’s a “rule” that exists somewhere in the abstract, that doesn’t mean folks should assail people for innocent mistakes. It’s also not a rule of this community. It’s not a rule of the instance this community is a part of. It’s most definitely not a rule of “the platform.”
In fact, these the W3C (the body most people are seemingly citing as a source for rules) isn’t even calling their “rules”, rules. They call them “guidelines” https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/.
Ya, I’m colorblind, but you’re probably not and you probably didn’t think about it. You’re just some random person on the internet, you’ve probably got plenty of other things to worry about than hunting down the latest WC3 publication on accessibility.
To be clear, I do let folks know if there’s a chart I’m interested in reading that I can’t read, try to give feedback about colorblind relevant stuff, etc. (literally last night I was on the Deadlock forums giving Valve accessibility feedback). I just do it in a “matter of the fact” fashion and try to explain what I’m struggling with rather than with an attitude and command that they change something without any context.
Dictation apps have trouble with text in images, which is tough for people with impaired vision
😮so there is really no OCR in those dictation apps 🤯? Is there a OCR API in iOS? If so, it should not be too hard integrating it into an app 🤔 I assume
That seems like a lemmy limitation that probably needs worked on (i.e. prompting for alt text for images so apps can just read the alt text and folks are reminded to think of it).
You don’t have OCR in your eyes 😮? Or do you use a screen reader, there must be screen readers that can OCR, tho, or are there none?
Accessibility standards require us to not put text in images. Its not hard to copy and paste the text.
What standards?
W3C is the big one that I know
But surely there’s others as well
Privacy Notice
We and our 848 partners store and access personal data, like browsing data or unique identifiers, on your device. Selecting “I Accept” enables tracking technologies to support the purposes shown under “we and our partners process data to provide,” whereas selecting “Reject All” or withdrawing your consent will disable them. If trackers are disabled, some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you. You can resurface this menu to change your choices or withdraw consent at any time by clicking the [“privacy preferences”] link on the bottom of the webpage [or the floating icon on the bottom-left of the webpage, if applicable]. Your choices will have effect within our Website. For more details, refer to our Privacy Policy. Cookie Policy. Ways we may use your data:
Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Develop and improve services. Create profiles to personalise content. Measure advertising performance. Use limited data to select advertising. Use limited data to select content. Use profiles to select personalised content. Create profiles for personalised advertising. Measure content performance. Use profiles to select personalised advertising. Understand audiences through statistics or combinations of data from different sources. Store and/or access information on a device.
List of Partners (vendors)
oh hell naw not this terrible communist instance
Who the hell asked you?
Don’t worry bro, its just me and 2000 of my closest friends. Totally legit.
I’d like to see a cookie notice that just says “it’s your browser, figure out how to get it to handle cookies however you want. If you accept cookies we’re gonna use them and you can safely assume we’ll use them for anything and everything they might be useful for. European regulators can eat a bag of dicks.”
And the EU has forced us to answer that goddamn “do you accept cookies?” question on every frigging website. How many people just click “accept all” to get on with things?
The EU has forced them to give us the option. Previously, they’d do all of that shit without telling you.
ok to be honest i’d rather have the choice to accept or decline it and waste a couple seconds then having all of that enabled by default with no way to reject them
I have the ghosrtery extension on Firefox, I have it set to auto reject all tracking cookies, and reject all third party “legitimate interest” cookies. I’ve heard there’s other extensions that do the same, and maybe better, but I already have it set the way I want.
THAT IS A BIG FAT LIE! The EU did not force any such thing. The EU simply said that people’s data cannot be used without consent. This is the website asking for consent.
Website developers have a perfectly valid choice not to collect any data. They chose their profits above your privacy.
I have a website and I don’t have a popup asking for consent, because I don’t need to, because I don’t collect any data.
Cookie Auto-Delete helps with that.
There’s cookie lists in uBlock Origin. Just enable them.
It’s truly crazy how much our information gets shared these days and how long it lingers.
My house spent a few years as a rental. I still get mail from people who haven’t lived here in over a decade (despite deliberate efforts to stop it).
My grandpa signed up for ever “store card” you can imagine to get all the deals and rewards programs. His landline virtually never stops ringing… On August 5th alone he got, no joke, 43 spam calls (I have his landline hooked up to Jolly Roger Telephone to try and filter some of this out and help him out, so I’m forming that statistic off of the emails from them).
It’s completely ridiculous and all of it needs to stop.
I just occasionally wipe everything. I have to reenter passwords and such but it isn’t a big deal.
World’s nosiest polycule
They like to watch.
As someone who works in tech, I can confidently say that many people plainly do not understand what cookies do and why they exist. There are plenty of cookies that are good and useful, but third party advertising tracking cookies are the devil folks don’t like. Necessary, performance and functional cookies are all chill.
Like the cookie that stores the “Reject All the cookies” response for your next visit 😇
Exactly - which would likely be a persistent necessary cookie on most websites.
A question: What is preventing the site using one huge cookie for all purposes, thus preventing fully functional use of the site without also enabling all other forms of tracking?
Cookies are very small snippets of code that have a specific purpose. Making a one-size-fits-all cookie would make them complicated and much harder to track - which goes against the point of a cookie. Also, cookies are often independent of each other because they are from different providers/different tools. Having a one-size-fits-all cookie would also present a security hazard and make laws similar to GDPR about cookie tracking difficult to implement. An example of a tool that actually does use one cookie is Adobe’s Marketo. You can read some more about them here. https://termly.io/resources/articles/types-of-internet-cookies/
Same thing that’s preventing them from ignoring your choices or not offering them in the first place: nothing technical; it’s all up to the legal system.
I’m not sure how sites generally do it, but from my web dev experience in the past, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is actually implemented as one giant cookie. Iirc cookies are attached to domains and one domain can’t access another’s cookies. So if they are sharing the data on their end, I’d guess it is one big cookie. If they have their site set up to make the clients share the data themselves, I’d guess there’s a cookie for each partner’s domain.
It’s even possible that the information is shared without using actual cookies at all, since data can be sent to servers using the http get request. If you see ? in the url, everything after that is a list of arguments and values… Though the entire URL (after the domain, which maps it to that server) is data and doesn’t have to map to a directory structure and file on a server. Maybe this falls under the umbrella of “cookie” despite technically not being a cookie.
Or maybe it’s a loophole where the legislation focused on just cookies and falls back to these methods. Probably not, because if it’s done on the client side, it would be easy to detect by anyone who knows how to look. But who knows what’s going on on the server side of things?
Edit: my knowledge here is dated and outside of my specializations, so consider this more technically informed speculation than necessarily applicable to how things generally work. I say this because I see another comment came in while I was writing this that contradicts mine about a giant cookie being technically possible. My own use of cookies was to store a session id so that php could find the data that was being stored server side that was necessary for site functionality (like storing logged in state, user id, and other internal stuff we don’t want users being able to change by editing a cookie). They worked like maps iirc where you just give them key:value pairs, thus could store an arbitrary amount of data.
Well. I appreciate the honesty… I guess.
