Like many or perhaps all users nowadays I find the endless ill conceived cookie popups and GDPR notices a cause of great annoyance when browsing the web and this has become much worse in recent years. I am so sick of websites telling me they care about my privacy, so they want to follow me everywhere.
It would make a world of difference to the browsing experience if these could be blocked automatically by Brave, but in the meanwhile I was curious to know whether clicking the consent agreement actually allows those cookies through or does the automated blocking still negate them?
I don’t actually want to accept cookies unless they are essential like adding an item to a shopping cart. I really just want to block the endless popups created by stupid laws. If Brave can block the pop ups and the tracking cookies I think it would quickly become the most popular browser on the planet.
Absolutely second this. It’s annoying but also wastes a lot of time.
I would just add though… once or twice I’ve actually clicked through the “show me the options” and found that on some sites I can refuse every single cookie except those required for basic functionality. So there are cases where this banner provides genuine options.
The madness of all this is that on some sites you can click accept all in frustration just to move on but you come back next week and there is another pop up because they have changed their cookies. I find this particularly with online newspapers that are endlessly updating their cookies.
The whole business is wildly ill conceived and there are many that ride a coach and horses through any concept of privacy by saying that you are agreeing to accept cookies if you continue using the site and inviting you to click accept with a completely meaningly action.
I actually bought a Safari plugin called Wipr a few days ago that seems to have cut down on these pop ups by about 90% but from what I can see it is still allowing a lot of cookies. Perhaps they are not tracking cookies. In any case, Brave really needs something that can deal with this and I would have more faith in them to do it properly than other browser developers.
I’d add a slightly different perspective. If I understand correctly, even this fact of having to be notified about cookie use, and to give explicit consent, has only arisen due to “meddling” within the EU.
The French are particularly guilty in this. They brought out their “minitel” system as a precursor to Ceefax and the web generally. Never ones to miss an opportunity to rue a perceived injustice, they seem to have never really gotten over the rise of the internet and Google’s almost total dominance.
They have been deeply instrumental in creating or promoting all kinds of legislation around a more “open” internet - such as this cookie directive that came out of Europe and give us this maddening situation in the first place. Before they took aim at Google, nobody ever thought much about cookies and consent because pages just loaded WITHOUT all these stupid, annoying popups all over the place.
Personally I’m very happy with how Brave works, which is to say it has a certain focus on privacy and attempts to respect us as users. I’m not minded to want to tinker or add extra security, because I like the face that web pages work, and personally am not terribly bothered by cookies generally, despite of course I detest advertising and profiling.
I’m not aware that we could have the web of today with no cookies at all, or rather if we did it would be way more frustrating than now because… well, it’s obvious surely.
I have been building websites in the UK for a couple years now and it doesn’t take long to work out who are the Brexiteers and who are the Europhiles. When confronted with issues like EU Cookies and GDPR the Brexiteers get irritated and ask how we can minimise the impact, whereas the Europhiles actively look for potential problems and ways to comply, even if it ruins the website. I had one such client last year and it drove me nuts receiving one email after another expecting the sky to fall in at any moment.