Jesus fucking christ, entering w3schools.com (don't ask) and I immediately get a cookie consent thing shoved in my face.

WHY?! Please don't tell me it's so I can get the 'best experience' because that's straight out bullshit. I don't need cookies and you fucking name it to get 'the best fucking experience' while looking up again how that one PHP or HTML or CSS or WHAT-THE-FUCK-EVER thing worked.

E-v-e-r-y GODDAMN site has this nowadays, to 'improve my experience' - I block ads anyways so what's the motherfucking point?!

Mother of FUCKING god.

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What the flying fuck is happening on the EU with the fucking GDPR corsairs!!

I made two - TWO - entirely static websites, hand-made, 100% cookie-free!! I didn't even need to store a goddam boolean cookie! No third-party content is EVER invoked, called or summoned! I hosted a small video to avoid Youtube! Facebook and twitter share buttons are links!! I DID ALL OF THIS ON PURPOSE AND INFORMED THE FUCKING CLIENT.

And THEN (and, of course, unsolicited), the fucking lawyers of an asshole GDPR corsair office came and scared the shit out of my clients and convinced BOTH of them to put the goddam GDPR cookie consent popup on the fucking websites!! And they took their bribe, of course...

In order to avoid billionaire fines because of the NON EXISTENT cookies of the SMALLEST, SIMPLEST, 2KB MINIFIED HTML page on the Internet.

Anybody else is suffering from this kind of behavior??

Make your cookies banner have equal "Accept All" and "Reject All" buttons, and I'll probably Accept All.

Bury rejection under a fucking "Manage Cookies" button and I will go out of my way to disable/opt out of every fucking one of them.

Also why the fuck would rejecting all take "a few minutes" but accepting be instantaneous?

Fucking hell.

NO. NO. A THOUSAND TIMES: NO.

I clicked on this out of genuine curiosity to see if someone was finally trying to discourage people from annoying the shit out of website visitors. A summary of the suggestions in their article as to what to use popups for:

1. Announce new products/services, features, policy updates, new blog posts
2. Promote your sales or coupons (including countdowns)
3. Encourage people to input their e-mail address / subscribe, perhaps also offering some vague thing they will get as a reward for doing so
4. Contact forms (e.g. support etc.)
5. Prompt visitors to confirm their age before showing content
6. Login/register forms
7. Display social media "share" buttons when a visitor has scrolled a certain way through the page content.
8. Display cookie consent prompt.
9. Help guide visitors to the part of the website they want to go to.

Of these: 1, 2, 3, and 7 need to die for sure. If a website does any of these things I'm inclined to immediately leave and never return. 8 is a little annoying but seems a necessity.

Someone even replied to the Tweet saying that popups are annoying, the company responded with "let's change that!"

Blank portions of the screenshot are to avoid promoting the company unintentionally as a result of the rant ;)

To all web devs adding cookie-nags on your companys pages: stop that! Now! No where does that cookie law require you to ruin your site with nagging popups. Where's the focus on usability?

And the rule about informed consent? Which normal user (like my mother) knows what that means anyway? I call bs! Politicians, don't get me started.

Every user on the internet goes JMIGA: Just Make It Go Away, click whatever making that crap disappear.

What user will go "holy shit, they're using cookies!! I'm outta here!" No one in the history of the internet, that's who. Argh.

So, a few weeks ago I was asked by a client to add a cookie consent popup.

Specifically the site must not track the user via Google analytics until they consent.

All fine and I added the normal popup bar at the top the screen.

The client asked me make this smaller and place it into the bottom right hand corner, as to not "scare visitors". After some design hanged on his end the message ending up being 80px side. I.e. tiny.

Weeks later the client is now moaning about decreased traffic levels in analytics.

This is to be expected as cookie message can barely been seen.

Facepalm.

I was browsing websites in search of a nice digital camera because my wife saw one but it's long since been discontinued. So I found this one article about a few current ones. I open it, it shows the typical GDPR consent request about cookies with a prominent button 'ACCEPT ALL,' and a less prominent button 'MANAGE PREFERENCES.'

But tapping the button 'MANAGE PREFERENCES' did not show any preferences to manage! WHAT THE HECK? There was only a list of 'partners' whose cookies I need to accept. A long list. A very long list. I stopped counting at 500.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? WHAT REASON COULD A WEBSITE POSSIBLY HAVE TO REQUIRE COOKIE CONSENT FOR MORE THAN 500 PARTNERS?

Fucking capitalist internet.

How must it feel to build pagination for the partner list in a cookie consent popup? Did the dev realize that they and their company are the primary reason for the GDPR? That they are the ultimate bad guys of online privacy, even worse than accumulators like Google who process their data in-house?

I wish that my previous company gets investigated. They probably got more violations if they are investigated. Here are a few examples:

The company is in the telecom business and they wanted to create AI summaries of their phone calls. So they used real private calls of their clients as test data without their knowledge & consent.

The CEO also made fun of someone handwritten CV on LinkedIn. Sure, he blurred out the obvious data but shit like certificates, past history & rough location was still present. It was not be hard to find who it was.

The 2FA of some IT services was still on the ex-CTOs private phone (now he is a consultant 1x a week)

One of their engineers moved back to Russia and has access to sensitive data. (aka call recording of insurances, banking, fire departments, ...)

Offering users to write a public review of the company for a discount if the review is positive. The "paid review" is not mentioned.

The reviews of their new feature are done by 'external' people but they all benefit from the companies success. The review is written from their own company but it was written by the external design company (CEOs wife under her own company), marketing consultant (under his own company).

They did fire an employee illegally (as in did not follow the legal procedures, the new COO thought she was a consultant, she was in fact not so she had more protections)

They did fire an employee for untrue reasons and waiting till he was on holiday & abroad (dick move but legal I think)

They did spy through the security cameras and made up a reason to fire someone. Company offered free soda during that time, employee did not like the offered soda and filled it with a diet-variant on their own dime. He then took his own bought diet-soda back home (not all) and got fired for stealing. (or idk, it might have been ice tea or fanta)

They did not report that an employee sold company data but he was let go.

They run cookies on their website but has no clause for cookie-consent.

Their features that they are promoting & selling is not working like expected

They lie about their server uptime or heavily manipulate it.

They sell a feature that is no longer supported and broke a few updates ago.

They are offering a product as a fix that is simply not longer supported by the development team

They have fired consultants and then refuse to pay their last month salary or only pays it partially. Happened as far as i know, 4 times (no proof).

Everyone had access to the full password vault including the login credentials for business routers and the credit card info of the CEO, CFO, CTO. It took me multiple times to report it to the IT admin for mine to be restricted.

Every new dev has access to production data within a few weeks or direct database access

Any person who has access to the admin-portal can spoof phonenumbers in a few clicks.

A colleague is blacklisted at the police portal for past crimes where they have to fulfil police orders. He did them pretending to be a different employee who was approved. Also, they do not keep track of the data needed to fill in the yearly report (idk why the company has to them but the police does not do it).

They forgot to implement a warning (legally needed) before someone hits their data limit. those people cannot be billed. Someone was watching 4k movies in Signapore and costed the company tens of thousands of Euro.

If I think of more, I'll add it comments lol

Safari refuses to load images on some websites lately.

I thought about resetting the browser / clearing the cache, but this will also result in millions of shitty privacy policy popups bugging me for months.

Honestly, I'm not quite sure if I prefer a broken browser, or useless shit I don't care for... :/