Skip to content

Comment on “Accept All Cookies”, or Don’t

Comments

I not only reject all non-essential cookies and click on the "Object to all legitimate interests" button if available. I take it further when there is no "Object to all" button, which is most often the case when there are so-called legitimate interests.

In those cases I will masochistically go through each and every one of the myriad companies in "Our Partners" lists one by one, and manually object to each of their bullshit "Legitimate Interest". I mean, sometimes it may actually be legitimate (e.g. prevent fraud?), but I so often see that their so-called legitimate interest is something like "Build a personalized ad profile" that I just burn them all.

I've honestly sometimes been at it for about a whole hour, tap-tap-tapping on my phone or tab-tab-spacing on my laptop, because I'll be damned if these dark patterns let them get away with it. Also, I can fantasise that the day a whistleblower shows that the objections were actually ignored or simply non-functional, I will join the class action lawsuit and sue them for the hours I have wasted for no purpose while believing it was doing something. But I digress.

If I had the time and the frontend skills, I would love to create a browser extension that will not only actively reject and object to everything. I would even like it to have a bloody-minded option to actively accept cookies from companies that do not claim "legitimate interests", but that will reject (and object to) any that do. A man can only dream, while he's tap-tap-tapping "object" for hours and cannot even remember what the site he was going to look at is even about...

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.