from Hacker News

Tell HN: Sites are bluffing with their cookie pop-ups

by ConspiracyFact on 4/14/25, 6:04 AM with 10 comments

For the longest time I always hit "Accept all", because if I'm going to look at stuff like wikileaks etc. I use incognito mode, and I obviously wanted to use the site requesting permission, so I didn't want it to break. Just for fun I've started to always click "Reject all" or "Necessary only" or whatever the non-"Accept all" option is, and...not a single site has functioned worse in any way.

This may be old news to many, but I found it mildly amusing.

  • by ailef on 4/14/25, 7:48 AM

    The cookies are for showing you targeted advertising. They are not related to the functioning of the website (except the necessary cookies).

  • by thorin on 4/14/25, 10:28 AM

    I think this is fairly commonly understood in the UK/Europe at least where they tend to mandate this rubbish. Surely the law should just state that Necessary only is the default... On some sites you have to drag 10s-100s of sliders to turn off all of the optional cookies. This is a good way of knowing a site I don't want to visit!

  • by callamdelaney on 4/14/25, 11:32 AM

    UK here, if I can't reject all and firefox's reading mode doesn't work I leave the site tbh

  • by 0xCE0 on 4/15/25, 4:20 AM

    If the sites are bluffing maybe you can too.

    If the actual page content is loaded and the cookie is just a modal box slapped on top of it, right click the cookie modal box > open inspector > remove the child element of body that contains the cookie box. If cookie box disabled scrolling, select body tag at the inspector and tick off the overflow and position stylings to default.