You can save time and preserve your privacy.
Cookie pop-ups have taken over the internet. Hereâs how to stop them. I flew to England last year, and boy were my arms tired! Tired of clicking through cookie pop-ups on every website I visited, that is. Surely you know what Iâm talking about: [those banners or pop-ups]( that often appear, unbidden, when you go to a website youâve never been to before. Theyâre supposed to tell you that a website is tracking you using tiny pieces of code called cookies and give you a way to refuse those cookies, as required by law in certain places (England, for instance). What the pop-ups usually do is tell you the page youâre visiting uses cookies to give you a better experience but you can â and then at this point youâve probably stopped reading the fine print and just hit the big bright button that says âACCEPTâ because you donât have time for this. Now youâve done exactly what the website wants you to do: agreed to be tracked. âYouâre forced to spend excess time having to engage with this thing, to hunt and find the setting that you may wish is just readily available to you,â Jennifer King, privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, told Recode. âThey are annoying.â If youâre sick of it being such a chore to preserve your privacy, I have some good news for you: There are ways to reject cookies and block those pop-ups from appearing at all. A new one, called Never-Consent, was announced today. It comes to us from Ghostery, which specializes in privacy-centric web tools. If it does as Ghostery promises, it will make preserving your privacy as easy and fast as it is to click âacceptâ on those pop-ups now. The cost will be the âpersonalizedâ experience that marketers say their cookies provide. While some cookies are necessary for a website to function and do, in fact, make your experience better, a lot of them are simply there to track you across the internet and collect data about you, usually by companies you had no idea were embedded in that website in the first place. The European Unionâs General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was supposed to tell users that they were being tracked and give them a way to opt out of that tracking. GDPR is well-meaning in theory. But in practice, many companies have perverted the rules to give us these deceivingly worded banners that no one understands and everyone hates. If youâre looking for examples of [dark patterns](, or designs meant to manipulate people into doing or choosing certain things, you can usually find them in your nearest cookie consent pop-up. âThey make it really super easy to click the button that says âYes, I accept all forms of tracking,â and they make it super hard to say no,â said Harry Brignull, who coined the term âdark patternsâ and [tracks them on his website](. âFor example, perhaps they'll have a maze of menus and dozens of things to click on different pages. None of this stuff really needs to exist â its only purpose is to trick you or frustrate you into giving up and just clicking the big shiny accept button.â You may have noticed that a lot of US-based websites have them, too. Maybe youâve also noticed that many more of them have added banners in the last few years. Thatâs probably because of the [California Consumer Privacy Act]( (CCPA), which took effect in the beginning of 2020. CCPA says websites must at least tell users that theyâre being tracked. Unlike GDPR, it doesnât require sites to give users an option to reject cookies unless the users are under 16 years old. Rather than try to figure out the relevant details â which visitors are teens and which are adults, which users are Europe-based and which arenât, and which users are in California and which arenât â many sites have just gone with an opt-in consent banner to cover their bases. And then most of them make rejecting cookies the path of most resistance. Thatâs where Never-Consent comes in. It both blocks pop-ups and rejects cookies automatically. Never-Consent will be added to [Ghosteryâs browser extension]( in the coming weeks. All you have to do is install the extension and it will do the work for you, the company says. Krzysztof Modras, director of engineering and product at Ghostery, said that the company basically looked at about 100 existing cookie consent frameworks and figured out a way to automatically reject and block them. [The Interactive Advertising Bureau Europeâs framework](, for example, is on [about 80 percent]( of European websites, but it was also recently found to be in violation of the GDPR. (Oops!) That means there may be some sites that slip by if theyâre not using a third-party cookie consent mechanism known to Ghostery. But users can report those sites to Ghostery, and those frameworks will be added. There are a [few other extensions]( you can try that do something similar to Never-Consent. If you donât want to bother with finding and installing browser extensions â and Brignull points out that browser extensions and the companies that make them can also be tracking you, so be careful whom you trust â you can always [use a browser]( that blocks tracking cookies by default. At this point, almost all of them do [except Chrome](, which is by far the most popular and also made by a company with [a vested interest in tracking you]( across the internet, which is surely a coincidence. Thereâs also [Global Privacy Control](, which automatically tells websites not to sell or share a userâs data. But GPC isnât available on all browsers (Chrome and Safari, most notably), and websites are [only compelled]( to respect it for Californiaâs users, per the CCPA. The United Kingdom is [working on ways]( to get rid of cookie pop-ups and replace them with a browser-based tool as well. Ghosteryâs extension blocked third-party cookies before Never-Consent. But now youâll also be able to actively tell those websites you donât want to be tracked in addition to passively blocking their cookies. âI think the big picture is that it is important to have a tool that not only blocks these things but actively sends a no consent back to the publishers,â Jean-Paul Schmetz, CEO of Ghostery, said. How much does that really matter to websites that deploy pop-ups designed to confuse and annoy you into submission? Iâm not so sure. Especially if, like me, you live in a place that doesnât have privacy laws requiring companies to respect your preferences. But at the very least, itâll give you a sense of advocating for yourself. Just donât think that your days of annoying pop-ups or being tracked are over forever. Companies are using them more and more to encourage you to sign up for newsletters and marketing emails. Thatâs [their way]( of still collecting data about you now that cookies are on their way out. 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