Cookie banner keeps coming back

I hate that we supposedly have to have that cookie banner. I wonder if something was preventing the cookie from being stored that it looks at to know it doesn’t need to be there anymore?

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That bit of nonsense is allegedly required by GDPR laws. Whether your site, being (I assume) operated and hosted in the USA needs to comply is something the lawyers can argue.

FWIW, my ad-blocker blocks it and most cookie notices. The EasyList Cookie List has the filter rules for that. It’s also part of the Fanboy’s Annoyance List.

As best I can figure out from reading things like this, the fact that we hold data on EU users requires that we be compliant.

Many/most privacy notices contain a clause to the effect that if you continues using the site you’re deemed to have accepted the site’s privacy terms and conditions.

I’m curious how blocking the notice but then continuing to use the site works from a purely legal perspective. Could the site owner argue that:

  • reasonable notice has been given in a generally accepted manner
  • you’ve taken steps to deliberately block delivery of a notice, the contents of which any reasonable person would be expected to aware of
  • therefore a court should rule by continuing to use the site you have de facto agreed to the owner using anything gleaned from your interaction with the site for whatever the owner wants to do with it?

This has been an on-going / persistent issue for me with the TidBITS site… Ever since you guys started doing this banner, it reappears roughly monthly. I’ve been living with it, but boy it’s annoying. I use Safari 80-90% of the time. And now today, it won’t go away at all. No matter how many times I click the accept button. Currently I’m using Safari version 18.1.1 in Sequoia OS.

Have you tried logging in? I’m not quite sure how being a logged-in user interacts with the cookie banner.

The whole thing is a waste of time, and if I could find sufficient legal advice that it’s unnecessary, I’d delete it in a heartbeat.

Oh yes, definitely always logged in :)

If you could set this banner to not appear ever again, once it’s been accepted, this probably wouldn’t happen.

It’s that it’s programmed to recur (monthly I’d guess) that causes it to be a persistent issue.

I notice that Safari fails to respect GDPR privacy cookies much, much more often than my other browsers. I almost always access TidBITS with Edge, and I can’t remember the last time I saw the TidBITS privacy banner with Edge.

I’ve assumed that it has something to do with Safari’s “do not track” feature or related settings, but I haven’t been annoyed enough yet to invest the time to figure it out.