> You (or your company) must be based in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, or Singapore, because once the pilot ends, we can only accept payment from these countries. (If you’re interested in participating but live outside these regions, please sign up to join the waitlist. We’re currently looking into how we can expand to more countries.)

Specifically note the last sentence.

Go to the home page and click the 'AdBlock Plus' link to add to uBlock Origin - https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/

1 less addon with access to all sites you visit.

To remove cookie banners permanently on lesser known sites, follow this 30 second guide by the dev - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TvCGWwQr5o

it's not enabled by default

I maintain both the "I don't care about cookies" and the premium "No, thanks" extension and the filter list. All by myself, for the last 8-9 years. Please don't write stuff you didn't recheck first.

While the list is a cool addition for those who can't install the extension, it really can't do much when cookie policy needs to be accepted for the website to work properly. The extension accepts policies automatically when it's needed.

Cheers, Daniel

You can do those with uBlock Origin, but users don't want to mess with extensions and want extensions to work out of the box, so they install many extensions leading to malware and privacy issues.

Ublock origin is the one to use, and is maintained by the original creator.

I'd link to sources, but it's too easy for me to cherry pick... I'd recommend looking around to see if what you find corroborates with what I've stated.

> By using it, you explicitly allow websites to do whatever they want with cookies they set on your computer (which they mostly do anyway, whether you allow them or not).

Taking GDPR into account, this seems wrong, since GDPR enforces opt-in, not opt-out. Therefore, a notification only gives you an opportunity to opt in and blocking the notification should leave the website with no permissions.

Sites like Facebook and Ghacks automatically opt you in if you start scrolling down, because they said they would do this in the banner they show. You didn't read it, because you were blocking it with the extension.

The dev is just trying to save himself from silly lawsuits.

Quoting GDPR definitions (Art 4.12), '‘consent’ of the data subject means any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes [..]'.

If the site owner wants to assert that the user provided consent, it's up to them to demonstrate that they fulfilled all these criteria. If they assert that a particular action (e.g. scrolling in this case) indicates consent, then they have the burden of proof to convince the regulator or the court that the action was unambiguous, that it's clear that reasonable people would only take that action with the intent to opt-in, and not because of some unrelated reason such as wanting to read the content below. The legality of various opt-in 'dark patterns' has been tested in EU courts already before GDPR, and it's not considered legally valid if it systematically misrepresents the actual user intent and wishes.

The appropriateness of any technical measure can be trivially tested with a user survey - get 100 random people to use the site for 5 minutes, and after the "opt in" action is completed, ask them whether they know that they "opted in", whether they know to what they opted in, and whether they really intended to opt in or not - and if not, then your method for "collecting consent" does not work and the things you recorded - actions, clicks, even physical signatures in a 'meatspace' setting - do not give you any legal permission whatsoever, they're meaningless.

The one thing they can do with that banner and scrolling is to cover their information requirements, where they have the right to do some thing even if the user disagrees (much less opts in), but they are required to notify the users that they are doing that thing. But there it makes all sense that the user can choose to delete that banner if they want to, it's like the notifications in supermarkets that they have cameras - they're required to display them, but the users don't need to read them if they don't care.

The law is pretty clear, nobody should be surprised that their banners are non-compliant.

They give you a good,easy way to opt out too.

The GDPR approach is that processing personal data by companies is prohibited by default, unless they can point out one of the specific GDPR subsections that permits that particular purpose of processing. They are not allowed to use my personal data for marketing unless specific conditions are met. Scrolling past a statement 'By scrolling, you are agreeing to use of cookies for marketing' does not meet these specific conditions, no matter how clearly its said, so the banner legally makes no difference whatsoever, it does not mean that I'm agreeing to anything, it's exactly as if it wasn't there, and that clear statement is simply a lie.

And the "good,easy way to opt out" does not matter, after the opt-out it's just as illegal for them to use data as before the opt-out, since I did not opt-in. If they're using my data without an intentional opt-in, then they're untrustworthy cheaters anyway, there's no reason to try to opt-out of something that I didn't opt-in to, this should be handled by the regulator who will be able to audit them to verify if they have actually stopped using the data.

Furthermore, if had opted in, the legal requirement (Article 7.3) is "It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent." So if opting in happens on the main page by scrolling but opting out happens in a settings menu requiring two clicks, then that may be good but it's not good enough, because it's not as easy as it was to opt in.

> You may not rely on silence, inactivity, default settings, pre-ticked boxes or your general terms and conditions, or seek to take advantage of inertia, inattention or default bias in any other way. All of these methods also involve ambiguity – and for consent to be valid it must be both unambiguous and affirmative. It must be clear that the individual deliberately and actively chose to consent

Do you have a source on this? I'm pretty certain this right is not dependent on reading the banner nor even the existence of a banner.