I hate

They could've just banned the use of any cookies that weren't explicitly for website functionality instead of forcing the addition of a pile of shit to every website.

Burn the whole WWW tracking/advertisting system to the ground.

I get that but if it's every page and there no consensus on which defaults and buttons are available on the pop up then the vast majority of the public just clicks accept all on every one because they make it the quickest option.

The issue with that is funding though. People don’t want to pay for journalism or content in general.

It’s got to be funded somehow and, like it or not, advertising is the most successful model.

Funny, they manage to show ads on TV without tracking who sees them.
Same goes for ads on the side of buses, etc.
There's zero need for tracking cookies.

Most successful because most users don't know how much info they're sharing.. sweet! Should never have been allowed to happen.

Is there a chrome extension to decline all cookies? And what negative effects will that have on my internet browsing?

youtube is shit without cookies. Other than that, not much

Some sites will stop you doing anything if it can't set and subsequent retrieve a cookie.

Many of those sites are useless shit to begin with, but some useful sites employ this anti-pattern.

Perhaps an extension to accept the minimum cookies only then, and not the additional tracking for ads

Some things will break, some things will become more annoying. If the tech companies could agree on machine-processable standards for how they use cookies for surveillance, browser add-ons of that kind could work consistently. But they won't because then add-ons of that kind would work consistently.

Bastards

[unconstructive rambling deleted]

Doesn't Chrome support this natively? Firefox does.

Yes

General settings
Allow all cookies
Block third-party cookies in Incognito
Block third-party cookies
Sites can use cookies to improve your browsing experience, for example, to keep you signed in or to remember items in your shopping cart
Sites can't use your cookies to see your browsing activity across different sites, for example, to personalize ads. Features on some sites may not work.

Block all cookies (not recommended)

Clear cookies and site data when you close all windows
When on, you'll also be signed out of Chrome

Rad, thx

Hate to break it to you but…

Funny, they manage to show ads on TV without tracking who sees them.

https://www.adsmartfromsky.co.uk/
https://www.barb.co.uk/the-barb-panel-2/

Same goes for ads on the side of buses, etc.

https://www.hivestack.com/

Advertising £$€ are being scrutinised more and more. Advertisers have been moving budget from traditional media to trackable / measurable media in ever increasing chunks for years which has led to the types of tech above.

I say all this as someone who works in advertising and uses a DNS to avoid tracking 🤷🏼‍♂️

Not the same thing at all.

Sure, if you're running a smart TV or using a streaming service. I'm talking about terrestrial tv - "they" can't monitor what I'm watching. They can only take a sample and guess (and they'd be wrong)

Also, what you watch and what you're searching for or typing on the internet are still vastly different things.

You're probably not using the TV to research your unexpected pregnancy or itchy balls.

I deal with this shit at work from a tech perspective and I block absolutely as much as I can.

Information is power, why give it away?

Information is power, why give it away?

Because, going back to the original point, no one (massive generalisation) wants to pay for content directly.

Sure those things you mention are private but wouldn’t you want relevant advertising if there was a solution to your itchy balls? It’s not like someone is sitting there in the advertising equivalent of a bat cave pressing go when you Google scratchy scrotum. It’s completely anonymised…

I can search for 'Nut Scratching Services'. I don't need other stuff marketed to me.

If advertising was banned and everything commercial went behind a paywall, would I care? Probably not. Would others? Probably.

As for anonymisation. ROFL. Lots of it is 'supposed' to be anonymized but even if there's zero PII involved there's patterns that can be used to ID people if you were into that and that's before you even bother linking Facebook or some other social media with your other browsing data.

I think that's an arbitrary and inaccurate idea of the notional Venn diagram. Before you go on, I've spent a large chunk of my career training and communicating to both technical and non-technical people about tech.

Sorry, it wasn't meant to be rude, but on re-reading I'm not even sure what my point was.

In an entirely non-rude spirit, if it had anything to do with being able to visualise concepts, my experience is that people in computer tech are no better than the rest of the population and possibly worse on average. I don't know if that's because of the pool of people drawn to the field (which is a lot more diverse than it used to be) or because bad teaching saps their imagination. You only have to look at the code so many of them write to see that.

They can only take a sample and guess (and they'd be wrong)

BARB, innit. Although they only have a tiny sample size.

tiny sample size.

That's what she said.

Ah, fuck, no, wait..

teaching saps their imagination.

Really sad if so :(

saps their imagination

You can't sap what I didn't have.