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Aloha Browser Update Promises End to Endless Cookie Prompts
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Fair enough, but that doesn’t address the issue of pop-ups for cookie rejection or that a number website simply ban users from the EU.
That would not work.
Yeah, I would stick with Brave is privacy is important. Free always has something not good attached to it somewhere. Unless the company behind it has an amazing business elsewhere and they are just giving all this out there for humanity to... I don't think so.
You are not going to like my answer, which is to basically outsource data collection to the entities best suited to them - Meta, Google, maybe even Apple. IE: The exact opposite of what the EU is trying to accomplish.
I also doubt that the majority of users have the discipline, time and motivation to read through every single privacy policy or data declaration and jump through the hoops necessary to buy a ticket or reserve a table while figuring out the precise set of options necessary to do so without losing control of said data. More often than not, they just hit “Accept” to everything and buy the damn ticket.
So the unfortunate downside to all those countless pop-ups is that they have pretty much desensitised users to just blindly clicking the “Accept” or “Okay” tab in a bad to quickly dismiss everything so they can get on with whatever task they set out to do.
Honestly speaking, much of this data is largely useless to the majority of websites, since they simply don’t collect enough for it to be worth anything, and the reality is that much of that information tends to be necessary for a normal website to operate anyways. But at the same time, you don’t want them holding on to it.
So if you want to avoid a scenario where the email address that you keyed in to create a new account on a website just to be able to order something from them ends up getting leaked as a result of a database breach or you being subject to an endless barrage of email circulars, wouldn’t the best scenario then to be to fall back on “gatekeepers” which basically aggregate all these services and abstract away all of these processes?
The problem I feel with EU regulation in this regard is that while they may have identified a legitimate problem (excessive data collection), their solution often just locks in the status quo, and it may not even result in a better world when all is said and done.
Contrast this with the US tech companies, which often win because they address a problem by offering a genuinely better experience both for customers and businesses. The problem seems to stem from an assumption that users are being locked in against their will, and that given a choice, they would want to make a decision that the EU wants them to make, whereas in reality, we are where we are today because aggregators do offer a legitimately superior user experience, and people simply don’t want to change.
For example, instead of creating a new account on a website so I can purchase an e-book, I instead use sign-in-with Google or (ideally) they let me make payment with Apple Pay directly and I skip the account creation process and never have to hand out my data (I can even create a dummy email account using sign-in-with-Apple so my actual one never gets compromised). It’s similar to how (I am sure) many of you have a dummy gmail account that you use to create accounts with and is basically overflowing with spam.
The same can be said for apps. You want a central marketplace that’s actively being screened, where developers never get your payment details and subscriptions can be tracked and managed centrally, that’s the iOS App Store for you.
Likewise, Amazon lets me purchase anything online without having to deal with individual websites. Want to book a ticket or reserve a table at a restaurant, isn’t there an app called OpenTable for something? How do you avoid having to register for multiple online forums or worry that you may not find enough members to sustain interest? You post on Reddit.
Regulation can only go so far in these situations, especially when you are dealing with human nature in these scenarios.
Or you can grab the free open source browser extension Consent-O-Matic (for Safari, Chrome, and Firefox), developed by a Danish university, which does this for you.
Their switch to a subscription base commercial model is a shame… Aloha used to be a good alternative
Where did you find this information ?I found a thread about that on Reddit and the developer clarified data are encrypted and the new versions of the app aren’t sending bookmarks if the sync option is disabled.
I use a Safari extension called "Hush" on both Mac and iPhone and I forgot what those cookie dialogs look like, to be honest.
Yep. I use superagent. works about 90% of the time.
Use on mac, ipad and iphone. wouldn’t be without it now!
Love the EU for the protection but it should have been handled very differently.
Standard panel, "never allow" automatic option or big "this site sells your data" alert or "refuse all" button always as visible as "accept all" in order to be considered compliant.
How it is now, it's a joke, made to trick people who don't want to spend 30 seconds on cookies to stay 10 seconds on each site.
Plus, of course, there should be an easily accessible option to ask all (legal) brokers to delete all data. You violate it regularly and your site/app is taken down.
In an ideal world they should have just outright banned the whole idea of data collection for targetted advertising. Print media did fine without it for centuries. This would have meant reining in Google though, forcing them to roll back their search changes.
This is what you are greeted with when you click the „privacy policy“ link on the app‘s App Store entry…There are safari extensions for that.
Like this one.
Consent-O-Matic
Cookie pop-ups are designed to be confusing and make you 'agree' to be tracked. This add-on automatically answers consent pop-ups for you, so you can't be manipulated. Set your preferences once, and let the technology do the rest! This add-on is built and maintained by workers at Aarhus...apps.apple.com
I use AdGuard for mobile Safari but it’s not even close to the Mac app.
When you test on https://adblock-tester.com/ you get 100% ads blocked. On mobile safari, 74%.
Great site, didn’t knew about it! I’m at 75%. It blocked my youtube adds though.
Let’s hope EU side loading will bring some more controle in the near future.
Let’s hope EU side loading will bring some more controle in the near future.
And not just more ads...
While it was somewhat tongue-in-cheek; true sideloading where apps totally bypass any of Apple's restrictions would mean developers are free to do whatever they want in app; I could see some using notifications, for example, to serve up ads.
I'm not against sideloading, just think there are downsides to it as well.
First modem was 300 baud!!First modem was 56k
Well... except for someone making a phone call sometimes, it felt incredible back then!
I call this worse because it's really frustrating, impacts all use of new sites and could technically be fixed in a very easy way, it's broken because of stupid choices and not some tech limitations (like waiting 2 minutes for a bad jpeg of a lady used to be loaded when I was a teenager...)