Has anyone else noticed, after years of trying to eliminate them, pop-ups are now a thing on every webpage? Not even Brave Browser and its pop-up blocker does anything to stop them, either.
I'm not talking about the kind of pop-ups from the 90's where a different window pops up trying to sell you something. The kind we're dealing with now has been forced on website owners to force on us every time we visit their website.
I'm talking about cookie consent messages.
From an end user standpoint, is there really any difference between the above two images?
Albeit, the first one is for the webpage to make money and the second image is so the website doesn't lose money through extortion; from where I'm sitting, it takes the same amount of time to acknowledge the pop-up and click to remove it.
You know what an un-consented pop-up that constantly shows up on all your computers is actually called?
SPAM!!
Our glorious overlords have pulled through another genius idea "for our safety."
I can just imagine all those dopey politician fucks sitting around a table trying to come up with a way to make people consent to being tracked.
"I know, we'll spam everybody multiple times a day with the same message," they probably said.
And then all the other politicians would rabble in agreement.
One lowlife at the table might even have said something like, "Hey, why don't we make every website post their cookie policy where it can be easily accessed and the consent could be a setting in the users web browser so they only have to give consent one time?"
"That common-sense thinking has no place in a non-sense government," said the other's who can barley turn their own computers on, and it got shut down immediately.
Websites use cookies, I get it.
Who the fuck actually thought this through and how did it get by so many people without someone realizing that you would be spamming everyone!!?
Why even stop there?
The second anyone turns on their phone they're being tracked. The consent is buried in hundreds of privacy policies no one reads, but why not make us consent every time we open our phone? Every time google tracks my location they should send me a message saying something like, "We just tracked your location and ran it through a supercomputer to figure out what object we should push you into buying based on all the other information we've mined from tracking you. We'll keep that information forever and use it against you as long as we can while pretending it's a benefit. Was that okay?"
Every time someone drives under a traffic cam a text message should be sent asking if it's okay to use the photo they just took of you to send you a ticket. Every time someone walks into a store with a security camera they should have to sign a consent form to being monitored. Every time we buy gas at a gas station, the pump should make us consent to being recorded before it will give us gas.
Those sound pretty ridiculous, but consenting to cookies on every webpage every time it's visited IS ridiculous.
This is clearly a 1st world problem, but where does the madness stop?