Cookie Banner From Hell | Free Antivirus Software

Today I would like to present an example of a cookie banner that I have come across several times and which is a good example of what can be done wrong - in this case, on purpose.

Websites outside the EU in particular like to use Quantcast's cookie banner technology. The following banner will then open and cover a large part of the screen, while the rest will be heavily darkened:

It's almost common for the Accept button to be more prominent than other options. Here psychological care should be taken to ensure that you finish as quickly as possible by simply agreeing. Certainly, a reflex that many have already acquired. But I've seen that much more perfidious.

It should be noted that these banners are of course configured by the operator for the respective application, it is not about a general condemnation of the Quantcast banner. At Quantcast itself, for example, a very reasonable banner is used. The information below relates to one of these websites that posts funny or otherwise interesting content on Facebook that invites you to click. The background is obvious, banner or not, as before the profiling.

If you want to make settings here, click on "More Options". The option "Show Purposes" has the same effect, "See Vendors", however, has a very special surprise for us:

The beginning of a long, long, long list ...

We can already see here that there are several switches with two possible states. OFF is left and brighter, ON is right and darker ... Seems a bit confusing. And if you look at the list, you can see that it is probably alphabetical. How many entries do you think the list has? It is probably provider-specific, in this special case I simply marked the whole list and displayed the number of lines as text: there are 527 entries, each of which can be switched individually!

To make matters worse, there are obviously some things preselected. In fact, the Ghostery plugin already shows 13 active tracking cookies in this case, although no selection has been made, including old friends such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, DoubleClick, and others. Firefox blocks 3 scripts for activity tracking by Twitter and Facebook, ten cookies for the same purpose, and allows a further 17 tracking items, as these could lead to functional impairments if blocked.

All in all, a situation that shouldn't be like that.

"More Options" shows us the following:

Unpleasant: how do I know what is switched on and what is switched off?

There is no indication of which view is "On" and which is "Off". This list is also longer, formulated in a cumbersome manner, and certainly not transparent for normal users. With this banner, all switches are actually switched to the left ("Off"), the lower one I moved for illustration. Basically, I would have considered the lower state to be “Off” because of the dark color.

The easiest way is of course to click on "Reject All" to reject everything. And now comes the interesting effect: after pressing “Save & Exit”, the cookie banner comes back immediately because it apparently doesn't even set the preference cookie. So the only way to somehow reach the content, if you don't accept everything in general, is to rummage through the explanations and find out the switch where the cookie banner successfully disappears. Spoiler: At least in this case there is only one combination that means that the cookie banner does not just reappear, and that is the acceptance of all cookies!

Protect your data from internet fraudster with free antivirus software

I have already noticed this situation on several websites, especially with the typical Facebook clickbait sites with games and similar content, but also with more or less reputable US media such as newspaper websites. For me, this means that I immediately leave the site when I see this cookie banner.