[onion2k]

These pop-ups are making it hard to enjoy the Internet, what do you suggest to do to get rid of these pop-ups?

Embrace them. Learn to love them. They're a good feature. Making websites explicitly require permission to do (subjectively) negative things like tracking users is a massively positive step in the right direction towards us all having ownership and agency over of our lives as we spend time online. Sure, it means we have to do a little work to say yes or no when a site wants to do something, but that's the cost of privacy. It's not very high.

There could be technical solutions (eg browsers could sent a header to automatically consent with the initial request) or you could use a plugin (eg consent-o-matic), but really, this stuff is important enough that "Eurgh! I had to click a button again! I'd sacrifice my privacy not to have to do that any more!" is a really bad take in my opinion.

[cinntaile]

> "Eurgh! I had to click a button again! I'd sacrifice my privacy not to have to do that any more!" is a really bad take in my opinion.

I assume you don't surf in incognito mode. The collective amount of hours wasted clicking those popups must be enormous.

[onion2k]

The collective amount of hours wasted clicking those popups must be enormous.

You can't add them up and use that time though. That time is always going to be fragmented in to unusable bits. Millions of people wasting 2s each is not equivalent to thousands of hours of lost productivity. Likewise, one person wasting 2s many of times a year can't be replaced with a useful hour.

The 'lost time' argument doesn't make sense.

[cinntaile]

It's not just the 2s, it's also the frustration wasting time on something that adds no value at all. On its own this might not matter, but many of these small actions (not necessarily cookie related) do affect your productivity because they affect your mood.

[Aerroon]

But they're not unusable bits of time. That 2 seconds you spend would be 2 seconds sooner that you would be done with the website. If you visit 100 websites in a session then that does add up to 200 seconds wasted in that session.

[Aerroon]

>Making websites explicitly require permission to do (subjectively)

But that's already happening. Your browser just sends the data automatically. Putting this burden on the website just means that an actual nefarious actor will track you anyway. After all, how are you going to check that they actually don't save all that data your browser vomits at them?

If you want privacy then you have to make sure your browser doesn't send out that information in the first place. Once you've done that then GDPR is useful for plugging the holes for the non-bad actors.