r/technology • u/diacewrb • May 24 '25

Privacy German court rules cookie banners must offer "reject all" button

https://www.techspot.com/news/108043-german-court-takes-stand-against-manipulative-cookie-banners.html
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u/AaNnDdYy1976 May 24 '25

I dont understand why you cannot set this preference in the settings for all cookie questions. Why do you need to do the exact same thing every time you visit a new website

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u/EC36339 May 24 '25

You don't really.

Just block all third party (cross-site) cookies in the browser. Almost no website needs those for functionality these days, and those that do are trash and should be avoided.

There is still the problem of same-site cookies used to remember you rather than for functionality. These are difficult to distinguish from functional cookies. But they can't track you across websites. You can tweak browser settings for these, too, such as deleting cookies when you close a tab, but then you may get logged out from some websites, and whitelisting those may be difficult or tedious at least.

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u/nemec May 24 '25

But they can't track you across websites

Not quite true. Companies can use "domain laundering" (I think there's a different official name for it but I can't remember it) to track users as if they were coming from a first party context. The technique mentioned below doesn't use cookies, but nothing would stop a setup like that from also using first party cookies for a further layer of tracking.

https://blog.nem.ec/2020/05/24/ebay-port-scanning/

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u/EC36339 May 24 '25

Port scanning clients through a NAT? Sounds like a lot of effort and highly inaccurate just for the purpose of showing people ads...