So, this cookie alert on theverge.com is both refreshingly honest and depressingly disturbing

Hate when they remove the reject all button

If trackers are disabled, some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you.

Oh, the horror! (Not that we'll be seeing ads anyway.)

That doesn't include the partners of their partners

This is for legal reasons mostly. They don't think anyone reads this so they went for the most blunt and transparent language, which also gives them the most legal certainty. The banner is missing the reject all button though, which in Europe is seen as required by many of the privacy regulators.

848 partners? Damn I hope y'all got tested.

Now name them all.

As someone who works in tech, I can confidently say that many people plainly do not understand what cookies do and why they exist. There are plenty of cookies that are good and useful, but third party advertising tracking cookies are the devil folks don't like. Necessary, performance and functional cookies are all chill.

If the partner count is larger than the number of bananas I can imagine being in a bunch I decline cookies. If I can't disable performance or targeting cookies I decline cookies. These are my rules

Yea because I want a news site to have my precise geolocation data.

Me: *logs on to their website*

Them:

Well. I appreciate the honesty.. I guess.

Don't worry bro, its just me and 2000 of my closest friends. Totally legit.

It's truly crazy how much our information gets shared these days and how long it lingers.

My house spent a few years as a rental. I still get mail from people who haven't lived here in over a decade (despite deliberate efforts to stop it).

My grandpa signed up for ever "store card" you can imagine to get all the deals and rewards programs. His landline virtually never stops ringing... On August 25th alone he got, no joke, 43 spam calls (I have his landline hooked up to Jolly Roger Telephone to try and filter some of this out and help him out, so I'm forming that statistic off of the emails from them).

It's completely ridiculous and all of it needs to stop.

2 days and this post has fewer likes than number of companies that get your data for visiting the Verge. Holy crap, that's terrifying

Remember when they passed laws protecting our library and video store rental histories instead of letting data brokers hoover up every song you listen to and every news article you read?

Check out the Snowden movie. That's so much worse.

https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies

I'd like to see a cookie notice that just says "it's your browser, figure out how to get it to handle cookies however you want. If you accept cookies we're gonna use them and you can safely assume we'll use them for anything and everything they might be useful for. European regulators can eat a bag of dicks."

I'm on the verge.

I just occasionally wipe everything. I have to reenter passwords and such but it isn't a big deal.

We all have a fundamental right to privacy, which is constantly violated. Not just on a daily basis, but on a minute by minute basis.

But to play devil's advocate for a moment to assuage some FUD around posts like this, how many of the absurd amount of cookies overlap in otherwise innoculous ways. For instance, product tracking cookies. Say you bought a pumpkin on Amazon, and that drops a gorde cookie, a pumpkin spice cookie, a cornucopia cookie etc.

That's certainly not the same as buy a pumpkin, track your location around the nearest pumpkin patch, read your grandma's emails about pumpkins, and collect information to determine your likelihood of buying another pumpkin based on your sexual orientation.

The latter certainly exists, but does anyone know much about the former? How prevalent would they be in that 850?

And the EU has forced us to answer that goddamn "do you accept cookies?" question on every frigging website. How many people just click "accept all" to get on with things?

Is it really so hard to copy and paste the text? Down voted. Don't do that again.