THIS. Which is why we don't recommend extensions on privacyguides.org besides uBO (uBlock Origin). If that ever gets bought, you'll hear about it everywhere and there will most likely be a fork.
> The uBlock project official repository was transferred to Chris Aljoudi by original developer Raymond Hill in April 2015, due to frustration of dealing with requests. However, Hill immediately self-forked it and continued the effort there. This version was later renamed uBlock Origin and it has been completely divorced from Aljoudi's uBlock. Aljoudi created ublock.org to host and promote uBlock and to request donations. In response, uBlock's founder Raymond Hill stated that "the donations sought by ublock.org are not benefiting any of those who contributed most to create uBlock Origin.” The development of uBlock stopped in August 2015 and it has been sporadically updated since January 2017. In July 2018, ublock.org was acquired by AdBlock, and since February 2019, uBlock began allowing "Acceptable Ads", a program run by Adblock Plus that allows some ads which are deemed "acceptable", and for which the larger publishers pay a fee. uBlock Origin remains independent and does not allow ads for payment.
"IDCAC" doesnt have much to do with privacy, its about convenience. uBO filters dont help you there, as they cant click buttons for you on all the different cookie forms.
If there’s no buttons to worry about clicking (because uBO removed them), what does it matter? GDPR requires you to actively consent, so if you ignore the cookie banner (or block it) advertisers can’t track you.
However it was revealed not long ago that a lot of the third party cookie consent forms used by the majority of sites don't actually have any effect when you interact with them... i.e they tracked everything whether you consented to it or not, I think it was a combination of negligence (incomplete software) and betting on the fact that the vast majority of people just hit accept due to dark patterns that make it extremely inconvenient to do otherwise.
I think using uBlock etc is more likely to result in preventing tracking through blocking known urls and code etc compared to hiding consent forms... I know it's far from infallible but currently most trackers don't bother going to extremes if you block them.
I have (had, soon) this add-on and I very much care a out privacy. Blocking all cookies from non-whitelisted sites is more or less impossible with all the consent pop ups. Ant many of those pop ups make it really hard to reject cookies.
So I went for a solution that makes browsing less annoying, whithout storing many cookies:
- Have this add on accept all cookies
- Block third party cookies
- Delete cookies from websites as soon as I close a tab
I (and you) don't know if many users of this add on do something similar, but it is what's recommended on the website
> Please educate yourself about cookie related privacy issues and ways to protect yourself and your data. For example, you can block 3rd party cookies, install ad blocking extensions and then block tracking tools, delete browsing data regularly, enable Tracking Protection in your browser etc.
You got lied to. The popups are rarely about cookies, and mainly about tracking. The GDPR barely even mentions cookies for a reason. With this addon, you say "Hey, use whatever method you’d like to track me in whatever way you want". But then you delete the browser cookies. I mean, that’s nice, but that doesn’t remove your tracking consent freely given.
I know that that's what GDPR is supposed to be about, but it's not what the fast majority of the pop-ups are about. Most pop-ups I've encountered are explicitly about cookies, not about any other kind of tracking.
And besides that, I think it's really naive to assume you've got any influence on tracking that sites do on their site. With cookies I know I can choose to save them on my machine or not. If a website uses the fingerprint of my computer to identify me, they'll almost certainly keep doing that after I've rejected their cookies.
You can already see it with Google Ads. Some ads don’t get delivered if you don’t allow "create a profile on me". Now, if you think companies will ignore even explicit laws every time instead of finding loopholes, then yes, it’s useless. But at least for some part of it, it’s easily provable that they don’t.
Consent-o-matic is the extension that people use that do care about tracking (or believe that most companies will mostly follow the law, I guess).
Yeah, Consent-o-matic is what I've started to use after today's news. Didn't know it existed until a couple of hours ago. I'm just not convinced it'll be a huge improvement over using (pre Avast) I don't care about cookies. And I still think that saying "This was an extension for people who don’t care about privacy" is a pretty big overgeneralization.
