So called cookie banners are nearly everywhere on today’s Internet. What started out as a rule to give users more control over cookies turned into an annoyance pretty quickly.
With banners on many sites, users started to spend a lot of time reacting to these banners to get them away. Extensions were created that would do away with the banners automatically and other workarounds were created to lighten the burden.
Talks about changing the legislation in the European Union started some time ago. The initial idea was to introduce controls in browsers. Users would have to set their preference there and the browsers would do the rest.
This proposal seems to be off the table. The new solution wants to increase the number of exceptions. The main idea is that certain cookies can be set without permission of the user visiting the site. This includes service delivery, audience measurement and device security according to the new draft.
Sites would no longer have to display cookie banners to the user for getting permission to set these types of cookies. The rules remain for other types, including advertisement that relies on tracking.
Ideally, if the change passes, website visitors would see less cookie banners than they see right now. The change is a massive undertaking, as scripts, extensions, plugins and code need to be rewritten to comply with the new rules.
However, it may still take a while before — if — the change becomes the new status quo. For now, on of the better options to deal with cookie banners is to use extensions or browsers that try to disallow everything that is necessary or get rid of the banners entirely, which would automatically mean that the user has not given the site any permission to set cookies.
– 3rd-party cookies always blocked.
– 1st-party cookies: as is given we run the ‘Temporary Containers Plus” extension in ‘Automatic mode’ : all cookies & storage removed when exiting the site.
– Need to keep cookies for specific sites? ‘Containers Redirect’ extension and set sites you wish to not be containerized.
– Of course uBlock Origin on top of all which will as well remove cookie notifications: no need to accept or refuse, notifications just don’t appear. Works on 99% of visited sites, if not, we just click ‘Accept all’ given we don’t give a damn given those cookies are always wiped on page exit (if containerized of course).
Ever since I’ve adopted this approach I can surf quietly. This also helps considering cookies (& storage) you really want to keep. I happen to get a glance on friends’, relatives’ devices, and the amount of KBs in caches, the number of cookies is absolutely stunning…
This is history, I mean has been going on for some time. More recent bothers come from site administrators but, given is is for the sake of a site’s tranquility, privacy and security, totally acceptable and accepted, here anyway. I’m referring to captchas (Anubis and others, mainly Cloudflare’s) set by a growing number of sites to avoid scrappers, mainly AI scraapers:
SOURCE: [https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/]
“AI scrapers have been bullying the internet into oblivion and there’s not much we can do about it. The well-behaved bots will relent when you ask them to, add entries to your robots.txt (even though they should understand the intent behind a wildcard), or block their user agents.”
Bullying, bullying, bullying. From the same source:
“They will scrape your site until it falls over, and then they will scrape it some more. They will click every link on every link on every link viewing the same pages over and over and over and over. Some of them will even click on the same link multiple times in the same second. It’s madness and unsustainable.”
Yes, my friends, the side effects of AI, not to mentions the astronomical requirements for energy, not to mention robbery of intellectual and artistic propriety, not to mention above all the contribution to “lazy minds”.
That’s the way it is. The times of good and bad guys is over. The good guys spy you; track you, steal you, put the planet, finance and economy upside down by the requirements of energy and money, very, very, very big money. Good guys hope to remain considered as good because they do all their dirty job for the good of all. Truth is more complex. In fact they do good things but at a price (inquisition, tracking, targeted ads) which overcomes whatever the quality of the product.
Most of us are therefor in between real bad guys and new bad guys (formerly good), just like in a Western movie where the good sherif happens to be rotten. We have to look on all sides (front, right, back, left) in order to keep on walking. Sad era, sad Web.
I hardly ever see them and I only let a few select sites store or even set cookies.
I use Mullvad browser (not vpn) with noscript, ublock origin, as well as several personal config tweaks as default browser.
I also have a seperate sandboxed Firefox ESR I use for anything google.
All of that is behind a local pi-hole.
@Martin
Waiting for your take on the Zero-click Ad exploit and the PHP debacle as well as hoping for something on the Plex hack.
I run an old version of the Linux Plex server because the old version doesn’t require an account. It only serves local files to the LAN but, it does pull metadata from the internet for the DB.