Do you really think those websites actually check if you "gave consent" before tracking you?
It feels good to not agree successfully in the lack of a "I don't agree" button. I block their cookies anyway. :) I need to find better ways to mess with their fingerprinting though, or maybe throw back some bogus cookies at them with badly-formatted data instead of blocking them.
Is this something people do? Is it possible for a user to edit a cookie in a malicious way? Do servers typically trust cookies they have placed on a user's machine?
> Is it possible for a user to edit a cookie in a malicious way?
Obviously, it comes from the user's machine so it can be modified before being sent to the server. Unless you're doing something custom/fancy like signing that data you shouldn't trust that it hasn't been tampered with.
That way I never gave any consent.
Nowadays I have browser plugins that do that for me, but same idea.
In any case I block cookies on all sites except for a few whitelisted ones so big "ha" to them if they think they can cookie me up. "Functional cookies" my ass. The sites work just fine without them.