A cookie notice that seeks permission to share your details with “848 of our partners” and “actively scan device details for identification”.

        • davidagain@lemmy.world
          5·
          3 months ago

          If you’re looking for a never true anticedent reason that “some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you” is vacuous, that would work if they had an ad browser that was 100% effective on the site in question.

          If you’re looking for a never true anticedent for “If trackers are disabled, some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you.”, it’s that you can’t disable all trackers with a cookie dialog because of the “necessary cookies” blanket exemption, the too many tick boxes to use “legitimate interest” loophole, and that most websites use “fingerprinting”, meaning they reference you not by your cookies but by the worryingly extensive information they get automatically about your browser’s version, settings, capabilities and features, and of course IP address. So it’s never true that trackers are never disabled.

          What the Wikipedia article doesn’t explain well in my view, is that logically, “if A then B” means “B or not A” for short, or more explicitly, “in all circumstances, at least one of B, or (not A) , is true”. This is vacuously (emptily) true if B is always true or A is always false, because it’s not genuinely conditional at all.

          So I suspect that they meant it was vacuous, not on the grounds that the anticedent could never be true, but that the consequent could never be false. Like “If you give me $10, the sun will rise tomorrow”. In this case, all they need to assert is that “some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you” is true irrespective of whether trackers are disabled, which is almost certainly what they meant.

          I’m curious that the Wikipedia article says the base case in an induction is often vacuously true, but I think they mean trivially true, like cos(1x) + sin(1x) = (cos x + sin x)^1, not vacuously true. I couldn’t think of any induction proofs where the base case was literally vacuous except false ones used for teaching purposes, probably because I could only think of induction proofs of absolute rather than conditional ones. Probably there are mathematical fields where induction is used for conditional statements a lot that I’m forgetting.

          • tetris11@lemmy.ml
            4·
            3 months ago

            In this case, all they need to assert is that “some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you” is true irrespective of whether trackers are disabled, which is almost certainly what they meant.

            Ah I see. Thanks for the detailed writeup

    • paraphrand@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      3 months ago

      Back in the early 2000s, we were promised that the magic of ads online would be that they are always relevant and not terrible anymore. This is why the targeting and tracking was valid to do.

      It never happened. Not for a moment.

  • stiephelando@discuss.tchncs.de
    46·
    3 months ago

    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.

      • Sleepkever@lemm.ee
        18·
        3 months ago

        How is it nonsense?

        The EU law is that the reject all should be exactly as easy as the accept all button. 1 extra click, however minor of an inconvenience it is, is extra effort. And therefore strictly speaking in violation of the law.

        Nothing will ever happen but it’s valid criticism.

      • lenz@lemmy.ml
        4·
        3 months ago

        You underestimate people’s laziness and their burn out. An extra click to reject all is an extra click people won’t bother with. I literally used to go all the extra steps to reject these things, even when a reject all button was not provided. Plus I’ve found that sometimes the reject all button doesn’t actually reject all, and there are a few hidden settings still left to uncheck. It’s ridiculous. It should be 1 click, just like hitting accept is 1 click. The ease of use should be 1:1. I was getting burned out by those extra clicks and all that manual checking that took like 20s-2mins of my time. That adds up. All to read a single paragraph on some website? Bruh. Used to do this until I discovered ublock origin has settings that can be used to block cookie consent forms.

        To you, one extra click is no big deal, like a paper cut of inconvenience. To me, it’s the thousandth papercut I’ve received. I am tired of it.

    • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
      6·
      3 months ago

      I think you actually usually can get them to list them all, never much interested, they’re all going to be completely random names you never heard of, just so long as I can reject them all, that’s all I care about, otherwise I have to browse a different website on principle.

  • prof_wafflez@lemmy.world
    31·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml
      10·
      3 months ago

      A question: What is preventing the site using one huge cookie for all purposes, thus preventing fully functional use of the site without also enabling all other forms of tracking?

      • prof_wafflez@lemmy.world
        7·
        3 months ago

        Cookies are very small snippets of code that have a specific purpose. Making a one-size-fits-all cookie would make them complicated and much harder to track - which goes against the point of a cookie. Also, cookies are often independent of each other because they are from different providers/different tools. Having a one-size-fits-all cookie would also present a security hazard and make laws similar to GDPR about cookie tracking difficult to implement. An example of a tool that actually does use one cookie is Adobe’s Marketo. You can read some more about them here. https://termly.io/resources/articles/types-of-internet-cookies/

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 months ago

        Same thing that’s preventing them from ignoring your choices or not offering them in the first place: nothing technical; it’s all up to the legal system.

        I’m not sure how sites generally do it, but from my web dev experience in the past, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is actually implemented as one giant cookie. Iirc cookies are attached to domains and one domain can’t access another’s cookies. So if they are sharing the data on their end, I’d guess it is one big cookie. If they have their site set up to make the clients share the data themselves, I’d guess there’s a cookie for each partner’s domain.

        It’s even possible that the information is shared without using actual cookies at all, since data can be sent to servers using the http get request. If you see ? in the url, everything after that is a list of arguments and values… Though the entire URL (after the domain, which maps it to that server) is data and doesn’t have to map to a directory structure and file on a server. Maybe this falls under the umbrella of “cookie” despite technically not being a cookie.

        Or maybe it’s a loophole where the legislation focused on just cookies and falls back to these methods. Probably not, because if it’s done on the client side, it would be easy to detect by anyone who knows how to look. But who knows what’s going on on the server side of things?

        Edit: my knowledge here is dated and outside of my specializations, so consider this more technically informed speculation than necessarily applicable to how things generally work. I say this because I see another comment came in while I was writing this that contradicts mine about a giant cookie being technically possible. My own use of cookies was to store a session id so that php could find the data that was being stored server side that was necessary for site functionality (like storing logged in state, user id, and other internal stuff we don’t want users being able to change by editing a cookie). They worked like maps iirc where you just give them key:value pairs, thus could store an arbitrary amount of data.

  • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
    30·
    3 months ago

    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

    • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
      12·
      3 months ago

      I switched to cookie allowlist, and manually add the sites I want to remember me. I don’t want to play the cookie game anymore, period. The only reason they ask is because legally they have to, and even then they do the bare minimum and use dark patterns to make it as hard as possible to decline cookies.

      No more cookies for anyone, should have used them responsibly in the first place.

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
    101·
    3 months ago

    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 5th 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.

  • Nyanix@lemmy.ca
    7·
    3 months ago

    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

  • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
    6·
    3 months ago

    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?