I hear ya.

I use Superagent extension in Firefox. I have it set to automatically declines all cookies. Works great about 70% of the time, which saves you 70% of cookie popups.

Also works on mobile, where popups are even worse to navigate.

You can get a plugin for Firefox that will do that for you.

Do you shit with the door open in public toilets? You have nothing to hide after all and don’t require privacy there.

What about chocolate chip cookies?

I think that the idea that the EU might have had behind the cookie popup mandate wasn’t to actually provide any useful information or options on a per-site basis, but to make users more aware of the amount of tracking occurring.

On an individual website standpoint, I agree with you – the cookie popup law is obnoxious, and does a poor job of solving a technical problem that is better solved by just not retaining cookies. In fact, not retaining cookies – a better approach, since I don’t have to worry about whether the website is actually doing what it’s saying – exacerbates the cookie popups, because it ensures that a site cannot track you to remember whether it has already shown the cookie popup, so makes it do so all the time. Plus there were already long-existing technical options for a browser to automatically tell a website not to track the user, like P3P, that aren’t disruptive from a UI standpoint. I’m just saying that I’m not sure that providing a user a way to avoid tracking on an individual website is actually the goal.

On a related note, though…generally-speaking, I don’t care much about EU regulation insofar as it doesn’t affect me. People in the EU can do what they want, and if they want to place restrictions that affect people in the EU, fine, whatever. I start to have a problem, though, when websites present cookie popups to me. I’m not in the EU. Now, in fairness, they do seem to have tamped down on that somewhat – some European websites that used to show them to me seem to have stopped. But I still do get them from the occasional website.

tries a few

Like, thelocal.it is still doing it, for example. France24 doesn’t appear to be, though, and I’m pretty sure they used to.

It was especially obnoxious for European websites that had some localization feature for everything but then had the cookie pop-up hardcoded to whatever was locally used of the eight million European languages out there. So the entire website would be presented in English to me except the one popup that you have to click through before seeing anything else, sometimes has extra buttons, and is in Dutch or something.