Cookie banners are everywhere. 🍪 You’ve probably seen them and been annoyed. We talked about types of cookies a few weeks ago, and then also touched on the annoyance of those “Allow Cookies” popups last week.
This week we are going to talk about how we can get rid of those banners and popups altogether! The bad new is it doesn’t exist yet. 😭 The good news is that we have a plan to kill the cookie banner and I want to share how I think it will look! 🚫🍪🚫
At AbsolutelyNothing.io we dream of a world where you can set your preferences for ALL COOKIES EVERYWHERE (Remy Bear’s dream 💭) so that when you hit a website (or even download a new app) there’s an automated way to set all your favorite preferences. Managing permissions for individual sites is pretty cumbersome but if we could set global preferences, these cookie banners would go away and we’d all enjoy knowing we are enabling cookies the way we wanted.
So for example, here is what I would set as my personal defaults.
ANY Website that I visit (even if I don’t have a login):
| CAN see the basic stuff like what browser I’m using and if it’s landscape or portrait orientation | CANNOT see my search history, contacts, and calendars |
| CAN record my zip code | CANNOT make any attempt to identify my home address, age, religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, salary, employment, job location, marital status, or family size |
| CAN show me contextual advertisements | CANNOT show me targeted advertisement |
| CAN monitor my browsing/usage of this site to improve the product or customize my experience | CANNOT show me targeted ads |
| CAN monitor my browsing/usage of this site to improve the product or customize my experience | CANNOT send me emails, notifications or use popups to ask for my email (if I want to share my email with you, I’ll look for a form at the bottom of the page) |
| SHOULD let me know if I can pay to remove advertisements (especially if it’s a podcast – I despise listening to audio advertisements) | CANNOT use my camera, microphone without asking for permission |
| SHOULD let me know if they will pay me if I decide to share anything in the column to the right (and how much for each point!) | CANNOT share my information with 3rd Party Marketers (so that I see advertisements for their goods/services on social media) |
| CAN see the basic stuff like what browser I’m using and if it’s landscape or portrait orientation |
Websites where I’ve logged in:
| CAN ask for permission to any datapoint in the signup process | CANNOT show my profile to other people without consent (I don’t want to show up in ‘recommended friends’) |
| CAN enable anything I’ve agreed to during signup | |
| CAN use cookies to keep me logged in for up to 30 days (except bank/finance related items – those are 24hrs) | |
| SHOULD ask me for permission for a datapoint again, if the amount they are willing to pay me increases |
These are my preferences but they don’t have to be yours. Sure they’re a little more complicated than the 3 yes/no questions in the cookie pop up, but once I set it I wouldn’t need to bother with each individual banner. Plus if something weird came out in the news I’d only have one spot to update my preferences!
This is what we are working towards. Today we’re writing blog posts, but behind the scenes we’re also beginning to write the code that will help with this sort of transaction and ultimately help you reclaim your digital footprint. 💪🏻