this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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The "Accept all" button is often the standard for cookie banners. An administrative court has ruled that the opposite offer is also necessary.

Lower Saxony's data protection officer Denis Lehmkemper can report a legal victory in his long-standing battle against manipulatively designed cookie banners. The Hanover Administrative Court has confirmed his legal opinion in a judgment of March 19 that has only just been made public: Accordingly, website operators must offer a clearly visible "reject all" button on the first level of the corresponding banner for cookie consent requests if there is also the frequently found "accept all" option. Accordingly, cookie banners must not be specifically designed to encourage users to click on consent and must not prevent them from rejecting the controversial browser files.

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[–] [email protected] -5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Just a bunch of idiots that have no idea how shit works.

If they can reject all, but can't stay logged in after trying to navigate the site, who's fault is that?

but I can already here, but you can work around that

Guess what? The workaround is tracking. we're just re-inventing cookies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

This is about the option to reject cookies, not getting rid of them.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Also, require its html tag to have an attribute "data-legal-reject" or something like that so we can have browsers auto reject all that shit - while keeping necessary ones.

Better yet, attach this at the protocol level. "X-Cookie-Policy: ImportantOnly" or something like that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago

Yeah, there’s no reason why this should be anywhere except the browser level.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Another layer of annoying on a massively stupid piece of legislation that has made the internet immeasurably worse for everyone.

These preferences should be settable in the browser, transferred during http* connection and honoured by every single website you use.

Any changes that marketeers come up with should be ratified in the same way that changes to internet protocols are, and if the browser doesn't support them yet, they are assumed "do not".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 hours ago

Ah yes, stupid legislation ruined cars, now I my entire trip is ruined since I have to buckle up my seatbelt at the beginning of a trip.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

How is this a problem with the legislation? Do you honestly think your privacy was respected before the law demanded that websites tell you about how they violate your privacy?

Web browsers DO have this as a universal setting, Do Not Track, but websites choose to ignore it beacuse it doesn't benefit them to respect your right to privacy and treat you with the respect due to a functioning adult.

The legislation was a massive win for everyone except the predatory manipulators.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 hours ago

That's exactly my point.

The legislation, from the start, should have upheld the do not track and similar settings in browsers. Require websites to check and honour those flags.

Instead, we get some half-arsed requirement to add cookie banners to every website under some vague threat of prosecution (which never seems to happen unless you're a social media giant) that inconveniences every single user, and often more than once.

This here, now, is a tiny bandage on a gaping wound caused by not doing what was required in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 14 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

The irony made me exhale a burst of air from my nose before closing the page, never to return.

Basically every cookie acceptance agreement popup is just a 404 to me. No webpage has important enough information anymore for me to sign any kind of agreement. It's absurd. If you passed by a shop and wanted to go in and purchase something, but a clerk stopped you at the door and made you sign a fucking agreement that store would die in a month.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Make it opt-in where you must purposely click somewhere. And just hide that away where they have their unsubscribe button.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

It is opt-in, if you don't choose any option on the banner it's the same as choosing reject all. So, the best option is uBlock Origin with the "Cookie notices" filters enabled.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

afaik the wording of the gdpr says that rejection must be as easy as acceptance

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Not just "as easy" but "at least as easy". The assumption should be that the user does not consent. And there have also been a few cases where the courts have - quite rightly - rules that "pay for privacy" offers aren't good enough.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

i thought the pay or consent stuff was DMA though?

[–] [email protected] 62 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

Can we ban the "Pay to have privacy" option as well.

Fuck every site that tries to pull that shit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

Whatever notions of privacy we used to have are all going to crumble as the newest AI tools come online for prying open people's profiles and predicting their behavior, their locations, their personal habits and spending, their health and family and relationship statuses, simply by analyzing a few patterns in your search terms and cookies.

From that information, these same monsters are going to be able to target you specifically with the kind of manipulative effort that previously would involve teams of people working around the clock to derive methods for influencing a single target. But it will be doing it on mass-scale, putting that same kind of effort into influencing millions and millions simultaneously.

And we all have vulnerabilities. The more invulnerable you think you are, the more likely you are to be subtly shifted by long-term, 3-dimensional tactics for changing the way you think and feel. Be it the way you think and feel about the latest flavor of PRIME energy drink, to how you think and feel about genocide.

We have to get off the fucking internet.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 13 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

It's not banned. Meta isn't allowed to use that option, because it has monopoly power. IE in the view of the court, you can't avoid using Meta. For any ordinary site, there is always the option to refuse either and leave.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 hours ago

The scope of this opinion is indeed limited to the implementation by large online platforms (which are defined for the purposes of this opinion)

[–] [email protected] 23 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

A disgusting behavior that I've seen in Spain is for websites to direct you to their subscription page if you say you don't want to be tracked, either you pay for the content or you don't get any content. Apparently the Spanish courts have deemed this legal.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 hours ago

If you use uBlock Origin, add the following rule:

* privacy-center.org * block

This kills 99 % of the "accept or pay" modals, an you can still access the page normally.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

I recently started to use "I still don't care about cookies". So far so good.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 14 hours ago

The issue about that extension is this:

When it's needed for the website to work properly, it will automatically accept the cookie policy for you (sometimes it will accept all and sometimes only necessary cookie categories, depending on what's easier to do).

It will often just accept the cookies as is.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 20 hours ago

This and Consent-o-matic

[–] [email protected] 17 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Cookie banners need to piss off forever. You may set some functional cookies only if I log in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

what about color scheme cookies?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 21 hours ago

You may set some functional cookies only if I log in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -2 points 19 hours ago

websites should be allowed fun and whimsy

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The kind of stupid shit societies have to invest money in. Don't get me wrong, it's good news, it's just baffling that money had to be invested in order to get these bastards to do the civil thing.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago

'its baffling in a capitalist society, corporations do everything they can to squeeze the most money out of their users with zero regard for the users wants or needs, and do whatever they can to skirt legal obligations that protect consumer privacy and security'

Yeah. I'm baffled.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

A friend of a friends relative's 2nd cousin mentioned that pornography sites have been surprisingly compliant about this, already.

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