These days what I typically want to block are the gdpr modals that pop up that demand you read and interact with a bunch of legalese or click I surrender, own me.
DNT was supposed to be a solution. Companies who insist on nagging you until you "voluntarily consent" are to blame. I'm not sure what killed DNT but it seems like they're trying to revive it again in Europe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30022523
No doubt companies who want to violate your privacy will lobby hard against this.
I remain convinced Do Not Track was a piece of sophisticated satire. The notion that companies would stop ad tracking because you asked them nicely is so openly ludicrous that no one could have seriously expected it to work.
Then are the consent popups satire too? To me the header would've just been a way to say "no consent" without requiring you to play whack a mole with popups.
Google was fined 150 million EUR for not having a simple "refuse all" button in their consent nag. A single button. The complaint was that refusing is not as easy as accepting all cookies.
150M EUR is relatively small compared to Google's wealth, but so is the infraction. And they can't just write it off as a cost of doing business and continue the violation, because they were given a deadline to fix it and from there on a penalty of 100k EUR per day. Actually I don't have the data to do the maths but I seriously doubt Google's practice of making of you click a few times instead of once can make them 100k EUR per day in profit. And if it did, I'm sure the authorities would eventually increase the fine.
Assuming the fine results in compliance, it really doesn't look like a joke to me.
> The complaint was that refusing is not as easy as accepting all cookies.
How many other websites violate this rule and are allowed to get away with it for 4 years now (GDPR went into effect in 2018)? How many businesses are based on denying users their privacy rights? TrustArc's entire business is to provide an obnoxious, non-compliant consent popup as a service.
The Google ruling is a welcome development but doesn't invalidate the fact that enforcement is still very much lacking.
You might be interested in the Adguard Annoyances [1][2] blocklist which is easily added to uBlock Origin, just by ticking a checkbox in the "Filter lists" tab of the settings.
GDPR applies to EU citizens wherever they are in the world, so unless they know for sure that you're not an EU citizen, they have to give you the prompt.
In that case, I’d like a browser setting that allows me to indicate that I am not an EU citizen. Then a website could check for that flag and not bother me.
I investigated this, but as more and more websites are non-functional until you chose a consent option, just hiding the modal with a cosmetic filter won't help. There are several browser extensions to achieve this, and I feel like this is a superior solution than my project.
