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by xoa 2681 days ago
>I only permit it on sites I sign into and want to remember me, which are very few.

I don't know if I'm an outlier, but I hate having to resign back into sites I use even semi-regularly unless its for administrative access or purchase confirmation. Regular "auto sign outs" already happens with a few due to a snafu somewhere along the stack, for me The Economist and Foreign Affairs are the major ones where it seems like every time I go back to visit I'm signed out. In contrast sites like HN or Ars seem to never sign me out (or maybe once every few years) and some of the newspapers are once or twice a year. Being signed out creates more friction then I'd have thought before experiencing it often, perhaps amplified since I tend to read on the model of "see a few of interesting stories, open them all in tabs, then go through them" and if signed out I not only need to sign in but every single tab will be "you've reached your article limit please sign in".

I have suspicions about how much it even matters when it comes to tracking for any site I'm actually paying for. I mean, by definition they know who I am, real money is changing hands after all. Within their own site there is no technical measure that can prevent them from seeing what remote resources of theirs I specifically am calling for, it's their resources after all with authentication required. And once they have the info what would prevent them sharing/selling it would be their own interests and the law, not anything from my end. Clearing 1st party cookies smells suspiciously like privacy theater for any site at all that depends on authentication in any significant way.

4 comments

You block cookies, scripts, frames, on sites you DONT sign into, and you allow them on sites you do sign into. uMatrix makes it really easy.
> I don't know if I'm an outlier, but I hate having to resign back into sites I use even semi-regularly unless its for administrative access or purchase confirmation.

Having set up a master password in Firefox, resigning usually takes me a single click (as the login info is filled in by the browser). Would this be useful in your case?

I use a password manager, so it's really only slightly annoying unless I've set up 2FA, at which point I probably care enough to either put it with it or allow it to use cookies.
The list of sites I sign into in the first place is very short. Most of the time websites remembering me is used to implement anti-features.