The newspeak/doublespeak for cookies is such that placing users under surveillance without prior consent is fine, you just have to tell them after you start doing it. And after you tell them, you can just keep doing it, and they can leave if they have a problem with it. No one ever has to stop tracking anyone else, even if people ask nicely or tell you they aren’t okay with it. The only option is to close the window, clear cache and never come back.

Meanwhile, this has given way to lots of “dialogues” where the dictatorship asks you to mark a check box for how you feel about being tracked, which is of course tracked. The deception being that even when you reply “NOT OK” there is no real effect. The pixels are there. The cookie is there. You are on camera, being recorded for QA purposes. This call will be reviewed for training purposes.

This differs from opting out of mailing lists, where they stop emailing you. Opting to respond with disdain for tracking does nothing to change whether you get watched.

Yes, I get that.

But I am curious about what shows up in their log.

I'd love to send "fuck no", but have no clue how one might do that. And I'm guessing that "yes" is the only possible value.

Joke's on you. That widget never gets logged. It's a placebo.

More likely, duration of stay, IP and cookies cross-referenced from other sources are the only things they look at.

Instead of recording your response as to whether you enjoy getting kneecapped, they just let you scream into a sound-proofed vacuum. But hey, at least you're not bound and gagged.

Hey, thanks.

I did look at the code, but over my head.

Vote with your feet. The longer you stay, and the deeper in you click (url to url), the more implicit your assent.

Well, only my Mirimir persona uses this VM, with this VPN chain and exit IP. And I have Firefox delete all cookies at exit. So they don't get much from me, no matter what.

Any advice on economical methods for persona-specific VM chains? E.g. 5 personas times $X/month for a commercial VPN adds up quickly, not to mention the inconsistent reliability/transparency of VPN providers.

I use pfSense VMs as VPN gateways, so VPN chains are virtual networks. But you could do the same thing with physical routers. Given that most providers allow multiple connections, you just need a few accounts.

Let's say that you have accounts with two providers, VPNA and VPNB. So you always connect first to a VPNA server, and then through that to a VPNB server. Given that each provider likely has many servers, there are likely hundreds of possible chains. Not all of them will work well, for whatever reasons, but enough to be useful.

Other than maybe as a statistic it's probably not recorded.