What is a well known 'public secret' in the industry you work in that the majority of outsiders are unaware of?

NotSpez@lemm.ee to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 629 points –
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IT in the EU:

Due to some EU laws, there has to be a "cookie consent" dialog on every website that uses cookies. I would estimate that more than 50% (probably too low) of these popups are cosmetic only and it doesn't actually matter if you click accept or reject.

Wow that suck. I always spend time turning off every legitimate consent button. So I get cookies anyway?

You could set your browser to clear all cookies when you close it. That does mean you have to keep logging into sites every time you open the browser again, but with a password manager that's not really a problem.

You don't need cookies to stay logged in anymore. You actually don't need cookies for anything.

gdpr is a different thing than the cookie law, refusing consent is a real thing that everyone in the industry spent a hell of a lot of time and effort implementing to the letter because the fines for companies are way too large for anyone to ignore

There's plugins that will do it for you (with the max privacy settings so you don't have to worry about getting tricked by phrasing).

I even have one on my mobile browser.

Is there one for iOS browsers? I mostly use firefox on ios

No, it's only for regular Firefox, and Firefox on iOS is just reskinned safari (so no plugins).

Most of these consent pop ups are designed to be insanely annoying to the point where you just click accept all on a long list of cookies for individual things and they are not even grouped

it's illegal, there should be a "continue without accepting" link everytime, and in the selection of choice, all non essential should be disabled, but yeah, there's still some website not playing the game correctly, hopefully UE will give sanction at some point?

It's sad that for some of the more obnoxious offenders where you need to individually opt out for each ad partner they carry it still may take the addon 30+ seconds. Imagine how long it would take to click everything manually. And that stuff is illegal by the way: rejecting everything must be just as easy as accepting everything. If I come across such a site I typically just avoid them from that point forward.

90% of the time^1 there's at least a Cancel or Reject button. Sometimes you even get to pick which categories right there without it being two or three levels deep.


1 based on my highly scientific method of pulling numbers outa mah butt

That doesn't sound realistic. There are real fines for non compliance and it's trivial to find out what cookies you have.

You usually first get an injunction with some time to fix the issue, little risk of immediate fines.

So there is little reason to implement a working consent dialog unless you get a legal notice to do so. When the law came out we got a lot of such notices over the lack of the dialog, but after a usless dialog was implemented, it stopped.

Guess lawyers aren't that tech savy or have better things to do.

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