And their tip didn’t work to remove the cookie banner on their site
I’ve used uBlock Origin for years, but the dev doesn’t accept donations because he doesn’t want an obligation to support the software ongoing. This means I cannot support him even though it would come with no expectations, just thanks.
So thank you for your hard work Raymond Hill/gorhill You’re amazing, doing your part to make the world a better place.
Makes such a useful piece of software, and is also wise enough to set boundaries to protect himself from the toxic pressure of open source development.
What a G.
gorhill says in its GitHub page that you can donate to the maintainers of the filter lists.
Why does this page have a cookie banner and an annoying modal to sign up to some stupid mailing list?
That’s Substack platform fault.
Tired of those annoying cookie banners? They’re not just frustrating—they’re a lazy response to GDPR.
They’re not lazy, they’re maliciously compliant. The sites know how to comply with GDPR, but wanted to throw a fit instead. So they came up with the annoying cookie banners, to make users hate GDPR instead of hating the sites that were stealing and selling all of their data. And the worst part is that it worked. Many people wholly equate GDPR with the cookie banners, instead of the massive leap in privacy rights that it represented when it was passed.
They’re not lazy, they’re maliciously compliant.
Often times they’re not even compliant.
Excellent points, but the cookie banners were a response to the ePrivacy Directive, not GDPR. In fact the banners predate GDPR by about a decade! I know this because I decided to make my own banner that was slightly less annoying about five years before GDPR was a thing.
Funnily enough most of your points are still correct precisely because, as you say, “most people wholly equate GDPR with the cookie banners”.
I don’t remember seeing any banners before GDPR?
This is not correct. Since gdpr isn’t required in most of the world, they don’t want to comply. It’s not about making users hate them. It’s about collecting data, and simply complying with gdpr where they have to, and only where they have to.
It’s not about making users hate them. It’s about collecting data,
Making users hate GDPR and revolting against it is a means to that end though, of collecting data.
It’s a lot easier to dislike GDPR when you don’t live in a country that benefits from it, but it still annoys you.
GDPR doesn’t annoy anyone. The incompetent developers who made the banners do. There is absolutely no need for them.
no one benefits from it (at least from the part regarding cookies, which i am honestly not sure is part of gdpr)
before that, you just dealt with cookies with whatever cookie extension you preferred. now you would have to trust the site to store your rejection in a cookie, because guess what happens next time you visit the site when it doesn’t find any cookie.
and these fucking dialogs are hard to get rid off even with ublock origin.
so it is definitely the case of road to hell paved with good intentions.
You’re wrong but do try out Ghostery, a FF plugin that rids you of the popups.
uBlock Origin can also get rid of Shorts in Youtube, as well as the hover-play functionaliy, and annotations on videos.
Just paste this into your uBlock Origin settings/myFilters:
! Kill YT Shorts youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer youtube.com##.html5-endscreen-content youtube.com##.html5-endscreen youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element youtube.com###video-preview-container annotations_module.js$script,domain=youtube.com /endscreen.js$script,domain=www.youtube.com****Oh my GOD thank you
Huh. I love shorts. I have a curated YouTube account that shows me very interesting shorts about science, music, gaming, comedy, PC building, web development, tech news, etc etc. I wonder why people don’t like shorts. Using YouTube without being logged in?
Shorts are deliberately and effectively addictive. Once Google found out they could copy the TikTok paradigm without being sued, they forced it down everyone’s throat. Ever wonder why you can’t disable shorts? Because they KNOW it’s addictive. We are being farmed.
YouTube is a vital tool for news and information. It should be NATIONALIZED, and purposefully exploitative technology like shorts should be BANNED.
it’s mostly the interface, the layout, the clickbaityness the format encourages, and the fact that no useful information can fit in that short a video.
I thought hover play functionality can be turned off in youtube settings?
But as I was typing this, I realised it’s useful for non logged in youtube, I assume.
Does that kill just shorts or everything you mentioned in your comment?
Everything in the comment. They’re all pretty well described if you wanted to pick-and-choose.
There is also the Unhook extension if you want to fine tune what components are visible on YouTube.
I’ve used uBlock to get rid of everything: the homepage (leaving only the search bar; so no stupid video suggestions), the upcoming videos and the comment section. I go on Youtube to watch the videos I know I want to watch, not find new videos. I know this sounds a bit radical, but it works well for me.
I did not know that I already had the tool in my hands.
uBlock Origin is the best ad blocker imaginable.
But it can do something I always wanted: Get rid of cookie popups (but without acception them automatically).
Visiting a new website and being able to read the content directly feels so weird, although it should be normal.
I hope, EU legislation will force websites to accept a global “Auto-decline”/“Minimum-possible” configurable in the web browser, in which case no banner can be shown. IMO, that’s how it should have always been.
I hope, EU legislation will force websites to accept a global “Auto-decline”/“Minimum-possible” configurable in the web browser, in which case no banner can be shown. IMO, that’s how it should have always been.
The banner is a stupid solution. Tracking and ad profiles should be completely banned instead.
Yeah. The idea that tracking should require explicit consent sounds pretty good at first, but we now the result is that users are constantly nagged and harassed and annoyed until they finally “consent” - at which point everything becomes silky smooth.
So yeah, I agree that this kind of thing should be simply banned, to remove any inconvenience or confusion from the whole thing.
There is also “consent o matic”, banner does appear but go away in less than a second and auto decline as possible. Does not work on 100% of website but still does a good job.
And Ghostery, works well for me.
I don’t like consent’o’matic it plays a slow anination and takes nearly a full second
Just disable the animation?
Thanks
you can use it to bypass facebooks login popup(without logging in)
The AdBlock blocklist does accept cookie banners without concenting to tracking, when possible.
Check out the rules. It doesn’t just zap the overlay, it executes some custom js for every site.
adblock? is that the one that accepts money for whitelisting adds? :D
AdBlock is also a rules format, obviously you run it with ublockorigin or Adguard etc.
oh. TIL.
An article about annoying pop-ups immediately prompts you with a pop-up. Get the fuck outta here.
On the flip side, it’s a good way to test if it works.
What’s a cookie banner?
I must have Element Zapped it the first time I saw one and never seen one since
Usually anything related to GDPR.
I believe California has a similar law framework.Essentially websites are obligated to ask for consent of storing cookies.
Usually they can be denied and you won’t have a personalized experience (e.g. dark mode wont be persistent between page visits) but it should not prevent you from viewing.
It’s just companies will pressure you into accepting them by utilizing dark patterns and try to coax you into accepting the most privacy invasive options (and selling your data to >500 advertisers)My favorite new dark pattern is the one where the website forces you to either accept the cookies or pay/subscribe.
There seems to be some argument around whether this is technically legal or not, it seems to worm its way around the written guidelines just enough but certainly goes against the spirit of it.
The fact that “Reject All” is an option, has always been an option, gives the game away entirely.
In fact, functional cookies, that are only used for page functionality, like remembering your dark mode preference on the site itself, does not require consent under GDPR. Consent is only required for tracking cookies: cookies that are used to identify you (and then usually to remember what you’ve looked at, purchased before, etc).
Unfortunately, because the law is not entirely clear, and because a lot of people don’t know exactly what cookies are or do, even sites that don’t even have tracking cookies have added consent banners just in case. And sites that don’t care have added banners without an equally visible “reject all” button, the absence of which doesn’t even make them compliant (but probably enough that they feel they can claim they thought they were).
It’s nice, but sometimes it breaks websites. Some sites don’t work if you don’t click on the banner first. So if you encounter a website that seems frozen, try disabing uBlock for a second
i don’t think you need to school ublock users ;)
I’ve installed ublock on the phones of some very non-techie older adults in my life, specifically because they’re non-techie and never would have even known ublock existed otherwise. Granted these folks are definitely not on Lemmy either, but point is there’s a wide range of users out there
i get that point, but do you think these people scroll lemmy to get this advice?
i don’t do unsolicited installs of ublock or any other extension exactly for this reason, because they will run into issue unable to handle it. and then next time, you see them using google chrome instead of the firefox you have fine-tuned for them, because “something was not working” and it did work in chrome 🤷♂️
I mean, it’s not like it’s a time-consuming thing to do. I haven’t checked in with everyone, but at least one person is still using the setup two years later and is grateful for it so I call that a win. But my original point was about not making assumptions that people who use ublock are going to be tech savvy.
But my original point was about not making assumptions that people who use ublock are going to be tech savvy.
but you have to join these two statements together. ok, some subset of ublock users may be technically illiterate friends or relatives of yours, but these people are unlikely to search for problems they encounter on lemmy, they will probably go to you. which makes my original statement still valid.
but we are definitely beating dead horse here.
Website operators don’t want to have to display cookie banners and users don’t want to see them. So what are we doing?
Website operators don’t want to have to display cookie banners
This is false. If they didn’t want to display the banners they could literally remove them, there’s absolutely nothing requiring them as long as they don’t track your behavior. They refuse to give up tracking so they add the banners to annoy visitors and hopefully trick some of them into accidentally opting into tracking. It’s an abusive manipulation of a loophole in the GDPR. If they really hated the banners they could just not track you but they rather make it your problem.
“trick some of them accidentally” is definitely underestimating average users. In my experience 95% + of all users click consent once, all is stored forever and they’ll never see the banner again, for sure not on the same device. They don’t do adblocking, no automatic cookie deleting, in fact no browser extensions at all. The average fediverse user is a weird mix of a 1990’s internet poweruser with a today tech kid trying to make it into the future technologies on their own terms and by faaaar not an average user visiting average website on average devices with average browsers and configurations. In short: most people don’t experience this ‘problem’ like us, because they consent by default to anything you throw at them and are then in the gated tracking paradise where there’s barely any cookienagging, visiting the same handful of websites all the time anyway.
Websites did it to themselves by abusing cookies to track users. Instead of consent popups though, the EU should have just blanket banned tracking in general.
If website operators didn’t want to ask for consent, they should stop trying to profit for your behavioral data. But they want to sell your data and have de it from you. That’s the only thing not allowed. There are plenty of sites that use cookies and don’t need to show a consent banner.
I’d honestly be so much happier if it was a permission request similar to e.g. accessing location or microphone access, for a number of reasons:
- would be easier to manage as it would end up being a single interface handled by the browser instead of a per-website implementation
- no differently worded, intentionally vague bullshit options that are designed to entrap the user
- no struggle finding the enable/disable option after clicking either accept or decline
- the ability to automatically provide a default answer that gets around to the fucking popup blocking 2/3 of the page
Browsers already have the do not track header, it should just honor that. If you have that set it should be an automatic opt out no banner necessary.
Unfortunately, it was deprecated in 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track
I once saw a German website (idealo.de) doing exactly what you said. If the header was set, they skipped the banner and interpreted it as “minimum cookies”.
Website operators don’t have to display cookie banners. They can just not use tracking/ad cookies. Simple af.
Website operators don’t want to have to display cookie banners and users don’t want to see them. So what are we doing?
Like the other comment, I also disagree with that. Most websites show them to make it hard to decline the tracking.
But I once saw a website (I think, it was the German idealo.de) which checked for the (now deprecated) "Do Not Track" HTTP header. If it was there, it then did not show the banner. I liked that solution.
It’d be nice if that header was default for all users, unfortunately it can (and has, probably) end up being just another data point for uniquely identifying you.
Probably will never be default since 99% people use Chrome, and we know who owns that…
Extensions seem the only way without making your traffic more unique.
This is the EU’s law, “See how much we did to protect you!” It security theatre.
Ah yes the classic “You’re making me hit you, I don’t want to, but you’re making me do this”. Maybe instead of blaming the flawed attempt at protecting you from abuse you instead blame the ones doing the abusing.
Substack blogs fund Nazi enablers. Don’t give substack clicks
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