Protecting your privacy and avoiding cookie pop-ups

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Ever heard of cookie pop-ups? It’s true that it’s hard to escape them. Following the 2011 Cookie Directive, French sites have finally complied. But rather than deleting cookies, they have installed themselves with cookie pop-ups, which throw annoying messages at you and prevent you from surfing the web. They’re useless, mostly because they don’t really improve data confidentiality. Their main purpose is for sites that track your data for advertising purposes to cover their tracks and pretend they’ve become virtuous. Here’s how to get rid of them.

How to get rid of the cookie pop-ups

You’re all familiar with those messages that warn you when you’re visiting a website that your data will be used, and that your consent is required to do so.

50 times a day you click, but not to get rid of cookies, but rather the cookie pop-ups themselves.

Internet users’ knowledge of cookies

Thanks to Statista, we can see that more than half (73%) of internet users in the United States are somewhat or completely unknowledgeable about cookies. Using this knowledge, websites take advantage by simply having a cookie pop-up, forcing users to click through to access the content.

Europeans are highly exposed to cookies

What are the countermeasures against cookie pop-ups?

So, what is there to do to reduce these repetitive, irritating messages? A content blocker sometimes won’t be enough to protect you from these cookie pop-ups. This list is not exhaustive and may evolve. Don’t hesitate to suggest additional solutions, which we’ll add to our benchmark.

Firefox for those who still use it

Let’s start with this extension for Firefox. Developed by Alessio Capponi, the No Cookie Wall extension claims just 26 users. Its evaluation is perfect.

Brave, the brave Web 3 browser that takes care of cookie pop-ups for you

Brave, one of our favorite browsers with Hubert Kratiroff, has also taken to blocking cookie pop-ups. Here’s what Brave has to say about it in the release of the latest version of the Web3 browser: “You know those annoying cookie consent notifications that pop up every time you visit a new website?”.

Newer versions of Brave can hide them and, if possible, block them completely. Simply update to the latest version of Brave.” If you miss the prompt to block cookie consents the first time, you can visit brave://settings/shields/filters and easily enable/disable the EasyList-Cookie List option.

Safari or the hunt for cookie pop-ups

Safari (exclusive to Apple products) has an even more radical option: block all cookies. It’s so violent that when we activated it this morning, we lost much of the content of this post, which we had to recreate. Handle with care. Because it also deletes session cookies, which are essential if you want to remain connected to a site. This is my case here on WordPress. I’m there most of the day and I don’t want to log in again 20 times a day.

Edge on the verge of an anti-cookie pop-ups meltdown

On Edge (Microsoft): Edge is Microsoft’s new browser, also available on Apple. It’s very fast, extremely well designed, and includes Web3 subtleties such as a Wallet.

What’s more, it lets you try out GPT4 coupled with Bing (aka Bing AI. Nice, but…). So here’s the CookieBlock extension, straight from Zurich. CookieBlock is a browser extension that lets you automatically delete cookies that don’t respect your privacy.

Using advanced machine-learning technology, it classifies cookies into four distinct categories. These are “necessary”, “functional”, “analytical” and “advertising” cookies, which the user can then authorize or reject individually.

Unlike cookie pop-ups, which interrupt your browsing experience, CookieBlock only asks you to define your policy once and guarantees that the types of cookies you reject actually get deleted from your browser.

What’s more, CookieBlock works on all the websites you visit, and doesn’t depend on the honesty of the “host”. That’s it! That’s it…

DuckDuckGo: hunting bad ducks

DuckDuckGo (the browser): the famous privacy-friendly American search engine is the one we’ve been using on a daily basis for many years. DuckDuckGo’s browser is a good starting point for getting rid of all these little beasts.

Shining like Chrome…

Chrome: Here I’ll pass, if you use Chrome, no need to pretend to hide cookies, you’re the product.

In conclusion

This overview of anti-cookie and anti-cookie pop-up devices is not intended to be exhaustive. There are many others. It’s a good starting point, however, for avoiding those unbearable and unnecessary messages.