alt Hacker News> 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.
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> 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.
For less-often used, e.g., non-English language sites, these often leave a site in an unusable state, e.g., non-scrollable. I often have to go into the developer tools to fix a site manually, sometimes hunting for the element to fix if it's not body or html.
> the effort and cost to download an ad-blocker that automatically removes the prompt to accept/deny entirely is practically zero
It's only zero if you don't need to interact with sites that break when you're running an adblocker. I run an ad-blocker nearly continuously, but there are all sorts of sites where I have to disable it in order to use the actual functionality of the site (and these are frequently sites I _have_ to interact with).
There’s a burden in ad blocker plugins: you never know when they will get compromised. Im comparison to that, simply ignoring the cookie baner is less effort imho
this is definitely happening and for some reason, no one has any clear evidence on it.
Conspiracy theories are gossip for men.
> 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.
Ok, can you give me a plausible example of what that harm could be? This seems in line with the exact thing I said in my comment; every time I ask how it could harm me, I am given vague statements about tracking and data. Charging me more if they think I can afford it is surely a thing to worry about, but there are so many ways to do that without tracking that I already need to take actions to defend against that (comparison shopping, price history tools, etc).
I am not saying I don’t think companies can take data they have access to and use it to extract more value from me… I am saying I don’t thing opting out of cookies is going to do much to change that, for better or worse.