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by aequitas 1914 days ago
I'm missing the inexplainable 30-60 seconds it takes to "save" your cookie preferences, whether you denied all cookies or just clicked "allow all".
4 comments

That annoying "TRUSTe" modal. The one you see on java.com for example?

While I have seen less of the "30 seconds to save" issue recently (I dunno if it was a ublock origin update or the ad companies actually fix their scripts). The issue causing it was ublock origin. Looking at the network activity when it was happening (it pissed me off too), the script was sending a request to each of the partners with your prefence and the script had to wait for the timeout on the request (as ublock was blocking the request) before moving onto the next batch. this scaled over all the partners listed in their ad/tracking partners added up for a piss take of a long time.

But as I said for me personally when I see that particular opt in/out modal these days it saves almost instantly, so someone somewhere fixed it :-)

EDIT: thinking about it, it might of even been the addition of FireFox's built in tracker protection that "fixed" the issue for me. I can't recall extactly when I stopped seeing the TRUSTe modal take forever to save my prefs.

I don't know if uBlock Origin increases this further, but even without it it's ridiculous. We measured this just for fun in a paper last year [1]:

> Compared to accepting cookies, opting out causes an additional 279 HTTP(S) requests to 25 domains, which amounts to an additional 1.2 MB / 5.8 MB of data transfer (compressed / uncompressed).

[1] https://informationsecurity.uibk.ac.at/pdfs/HWB2020_Consent_...

Its been an age since I looked into it. But I remember if you disabled uBlock on the page before you hit save, it updated the settings a lot faster then if it was enabled. Same thing for the Ad Choice mass optout tool (Though that would say it failed to opt out for all the companies as it couldn't send the request).
It's easy to explain:

"We can't be bothered to not load trackers without consent so we're going to make calls to all their endpoints and trust they'll respect that and not use the calls themselves to track you"

with a mix of:

"Hey, if we put a sleep(1) every 5 entries it's going to be slow and annoying and less people opt out"

The people doing it just know you won't like the explanation so they're not going to.

But the problem is that they have the same delay, whether you opt in or out.
Yes, this was on Oracle site when downloading Java (don't know it its there still). The thing had a progress bar when 'processing' cookies. Always made me wonder.
I always thought the intention was to make people angry at lawmakers for coming up with GDPR. “Look what your government made us do to you” kind of thing.
Certainly has succeeded on this site, though I'm not sure that's entirely sincere on the behalf of every commenter.
Don't forget the redirect away from the initial content with no way to go back.
Or going back, just to be presented with the same questions again and then hitting the paywall after that.
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome is what I use and most of the time I never see a paywall. (If you are a FF user (as I am), ignore the word chrome in the url as it also supports FireFox. I think the chrome version got removed from the chrome extenstion store, so you might want to look for something else if you want auto updates and the "you are using dev mode" message on chrome start annoys you.
This annoys me to no end. And opt-ins are instantaneous? Get outta here.
Thats the weird thing. I haven't had this case where the opt-in was quicker, only that both options where slow.

Maybe some websites just add a ad-blocker penalty whether you opt in or out.

My browser is set to not accept cookies. I then use the Dev Tools to highlight the GDPR/cookie banner to add a Display:none to the css. I'm trusting uBO/no-script/etc to protect me the rest of the way