I know I'm not the first to suggest that the cookie warnings mandated by the #GDPR do more harm than good. They're annoying, and they tend to make it much easier to accept than reject cookies (for example, the pattern where it's one click to accept but the other button is just "review preferences" which takes you to a whole new page full of confusing options). Really all they do is train people to automatically click "OK" on anything that pops up at the bottom of the page without reading it. Even relatively security-conscious but not quite paranoid people tend to think that cookie-related risks are low compared to the annoyance of taking the time to deal with cookie preferences every time you visit a website.
Which brings me to dev dot to, one of many Medium-like blogging websites, mostly focusing on software stuff. A lot of articles from there get shared on lobste.rs, or come up when I search for software-related things. So I click on links to their articles a lot, usually before I notice the source.
They have a popup that appears exactly where and when the cookie warning would normally go, with an obvious "OK" button and a much less obvious X in the top right corner. Except it's not a cookie warning. It's an invitation to "thank the author". If you click on it, you're asked to create an account or log in. Pretty much every time I go to one of their articles I get as far as the login screen before I realize that wasn't a cookie warning.
This is not cool of dev dot to, as I'm sure the similarity to cookie warnings was intentional. I have absolutely no desire to join a site that wants to trick me into signing up.
But it also shows how useless the GDPR cookie warnings are. It would have been more effective to mandate that all computer monitors have a warning engraved at the top that says "WEBSITES CAN STORE INFORMATION ON YOUR COMPUTER AND USE IT TO TRACK YOU. THEY PRETTY MUCH ALL DO THIS UNLESS YOU EXPLICITLY TELL THEM NOT TO. SOME OF THEM DON'T LISTEN EVEN THEN. HELL, FACEBOOK CAN TRACK YOU EVEN IF YOU'VE NEVER HAD AN ACCOUNT AND HAVE NEVER VISITED ANY OF THEIR SITES. YOU SHOULD PROBABLY TURN THIS MACHINE OFF AND FLEE TO THE WILDERNESS, OR ACCEPT THE GRIM REALITY THAT PRIVACY IS A FORGOTTEN RELIC OF A BYGONE AGE."
It makes me wonder what even more insidious things people have tried to do with popups masquerading as GDPR warnings. I'm sure there's some sleazy cryptoporn viagra casino site somewhere with a popup that asks you to consent to joining a multi-level marketing scheme and commit to selling a thousand jars of Antioxident Groin Wax.
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