Technology

A dark pattern would be some sort of underhanded but legal tactic to trick or coerce a user into agreeing to something they wouldn't otherwise.

But most websites aren't using dark patterns for this, instead they just blatantly and plainly violate the law.

There needs to be a browser that auto blocks all cookies, and all cookie banners. You can whitelist the sites you want. Beyond that, your browser tells all the web "fuck you!"

I agree -- and before DnT, there was P3P, which also would have done it -- but it is what it is at the moment.

I'm mostly exasperated with it because I wipe all cookies each browser restart, which is a much more-reliable and less-obnoxious solution than the EU's regulatory approach of trying to convince the remote end not to make use of its ability to set them. If you do that, you get the cookie banner every time on sites that show it, which means that the cookie banner regulation has made my experience rather worse. And unfortunately, some sites show the banner to non-EU-based users -- we don't elect EU representatives, but we still get some spillover from their policies.

There's some Firefox plugin that will try to hide the cookie banners:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/istilldontcareaboutcookies/

EDIT: Yeah, from the description on there, the author is doing exactly what I am with the "not retaining cookies" approach, and smacking into how poorly that interacts with the cookie banner regulation:

The EU regulations require that any website using tracking cookies must get user's permission before installing them. These warnings appear on most websites until the visitor agrees with the website's terms and conditions. Imagine how irritating that becomes when you surf anonymously or if you delete cookies automatically every time you close the browser.