First of all, if you don't practice any tracking limitation, you're almost certainly giving additional parties (directly or otherwise) access to your personal information. This is marketing data brokerage, this is the whole ballgame.

To your point about the actual harm, I've come to see it as a kind of ecological problem. Wasting energy and sending more trash to a landfill doesn't harm me individually, at least not immediately. But it does harm in aggregate, and it is probably directly related to other general harms, like overall health outcomes, efficiency, energy costs, etc.

No, accepting cookies by itself may not do much to me, but the broader surveillance and attention economy that relies on such apathy certainly has.

[Reject Optional], [Essential Cookies Only] ... I am one of the people who clicks such options. But to some degree they are "privacy theater". Any website that presents you with such a choice is almost certainly loaded to the gills with tracking/analytics and various 3rd-party services that will track you with browser fingerprinting regardless of any buttons you click on the cookie banner. Nevertheless I still reject them, mostly out of spite.

> I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it.

the effort and cost to download an ad-blocker that automatically removes the prompt to accept/deny entirely is practically zero and the amount of clicks you'd save yourself would quickly exceed the clicks it took to install the blocker.

> I just don’t think it is something that is worth stressing out about and fighting against. Maybe I am actually naive

It seems like you are, but that's just how our brains work. We're very bad at judging long term and abstract risks, especially when the consequences and their connection to the cause are intentionally kept unclear. For example, when people's cars started collecting data on their driving habits and selling that data to insurance companies a lot of people saw their insurance rates go up, but none of the insurance companies said that it was because of the data collected from their cars. I'd be willing to bet the data being collected by tracking your browsing history has already been screwing you over in various aspects of your life, online and offline, but you won't be told when it happens or why.

Apply the same logical test to freedom of speech, and you’ll get the same result.

You’re not missing anything about what’s likely to happen to you personally. What you’re missing is the manner in which rights shape your life and your society even when you don’t exercise them, and sometimes even when nobody is currently exercising them, and that significant harm can be built out of a vast number of smaller harms that aren’t individually that bad.

Feel similarly. And to be honest, even when I do select decline all, I have little confidence that the function does what it says it does.

I recently spoke with an engineer who was building a product using the information he is able to acquire from these data brokers. This includes every search query you've ever made, anything you've purchased with a credit card, and anything that is in the public record (i.e. a pending divorce case, or child custody dispute). He uses that information to generate a profile on leads to determine how much they can squeeze from this person in whatever deal they are making. (I'm not going to get more specific than that.) This person had no incentive to lie to me about what they were building.

The data trail you are creating is much more personal and invasive than you want to imagine, and in the wrong hands it could be used to devastating effect.

Meanwhile I just bounce from the site 60% of the time. Most websites aren't needed for my survival, and I hope they are happy that they lost a customer while I go to their competitor.

Moral of the story is: If you want me to see your content, and maybe spend money, don't cover up your content.

Especially if you're not EU-based and not subject to GDPR, stop listening to the laws of some foreign country that doesn't control you.

Read the fine print. You’re usually not consenting to cookies, you’re consenting to having your data gathered, processed, enriched and sold by hundreds of companies around the world.

One click usually gives random foreign corpos the right to your data across a multitude of platforms, the right to identify you across data sets, and to permanently link your device identifiers to you, for ”fraud detection” on a site which sells nothing.

Clicking on accept or deny on those notices makes no real difference, since the ”partners” and ”vendors” usually enshrine their core data activities into the ”legitimate interest” category, which has no opt-out.

I don’t think there is much short term danger from the cookies. It’s more the principle of the thing. I hate the bullshit language of how we and our 1500 partners respect your privacy choices. They don’t respect anything and would sell their own grandmothers for a dollar.

For me it's mostly a matter of principle. I'm against online tracking and I will do everything I can to not be monetized. Also clicking reject is not that difficult and if a website tries to make it difficult I just close the tab.

I'm worried about my browsing to be tracked across the entire internet for the purposes of marketers to "enrich" my profile... just to sell me more and to sell that data to third-parties who can make all sorts of decisions based on a made up story about who I am, my preferences, my values and whatnot.

there's a reason I don't walk around naked either. it wouldn't hurt me, but I don't need that kind of exposure for no upside

I think he is referring to how some have an "Accept cookies" and a cookie's settings, but to reject cookies you have to open a separate dialog box. I agree, and I think it is so wild that people would give their actual email to random sites.

> Maybe I am actually naive, but I just have not yet been convinced I should actually care.

You are. Tracking is extremely dangerous to the society.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less it'll take to get get you to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/

I'm the same, (well, mid thirties, and over a decade) but I always click accept for cookies.

The only times I've stopped, or tried to deny it is with the recent thing I've seen from some sites that say "accept cookies or pay money". I think that is scummy, and against what these regulations require, so I'll usually just close the site in that case.

Oh and to address the point from the main article, I think I'm unfortunately beholden to more companies, but would strongly prefer to not verify my identity, because I have little to no trust in the companies to safeguard my actual personal data. (rather than inferred cookie tracking data, which they can have imo).

"software developer" is pretty broad. Here this is specifically B2C (business to customer) applications. I only assume that you haven't been in this market sector, otherwise you would've been more familiar with GDPR and all the concerns that prompted it.

There was a time where the Internet was the wild west and you could've easily been personally targeted and exploited. Businesses sold your data to whoever.

Even today, if you decide to accept all cookies, you're safer than what you used to be.

Rejecting the non-essential cookies puts you in the safest spot from bad actors.

same experience here, but one exception:

I just always the most left button, as this is usually "cancel" or "deny" - not alwys right,though :-D LOL

It seems crazy that no one stressed it yet: for the last few years refusing the cookies has been requiring EXACTLY the same effort as accepting them, for the wide majority of websites!!!

It's disheartening that so many people still do this (and not accepting has rarely ever required enormous efforts, to begin with).

I don't think you are being naive but I do caution you before you don't worry.

Its not always clear what the desired outcome is here. The dark pattern could have nothing to do with the tracking most folks worry about. We like our phones more than our laptops because we touch the screens for example. The dark pattern here could simply be you use the site more because you do more actions there driving you to waste time and view ads. Who knows.

I like to just roll over and bite the pillow, click "accept all cookies" and let them go in dry and unprotected.

ublock it all away. ez pz

I would imagine it's the GDPR "ACCEPT ALL COOKIES" in big font and then in very small low contrast text "select some cookies" or "reject cookies" that they were describing.

Which is why I installed the "Consent-o-matic" extension which dutifully denies everything for me, and I have uBlock Origin for everything else.