closing multiple dialogue boxes in my sleep

I've been on a lot of websites recently researching all sorts of things, mostly unfamiliar sites, but some I visit far too regularly for the amount of GDPR punishment beating the site is handing out, particularly considering that I tick "yes" to all tracking cookies.

For anyone bristling at that and saying harrumph-glumph-what-about-your-privacy, well, yes. Fair. There was a hilarious column in the Guardian last week where a reader had written in to ask if anything terrible would happen if she accepted cookies.

EVERY SINGLE REPLY read "Never accept cookies!!!!!!!!!!! Here is how not to accept them!!!!!!!!!!!! Your privacy is being STOLEN!!!!!! with an occasional side-helping of "People are all wrong about the internet, and this is why and let me tell you about my book on this very topic, Sheeples". Although of course, it being the Guardian, the grammer was perfect and of naturally there were no actual ALLCAPS and !!!bangs!!! But fortunately I am fluent in middle class and can detect caps and bangs in the mildest and most reasonable of sentences.

Not a single one answered the original question. So yes, on that. I have been mindfully, and in full self-awareness, ticking yes to all cookies since the notifications came in, bar some basic safety behaviours relating to untrustworthy pop-ups and untrusted sites. Nothing has happened at all, and this, I'm afraid, disappoints me.

You see, I had been hoping that clicking yes to these would stop them appearing, all the time, and usually all over things I wanted to look at.

It hasn't. Many sites fail to remember your preferences, and you still continually get assaulted by endless requests, even on one browsing visit.

Plus this has opened a floodgate for other information barriers, like whining requests to turn your adblocker off (mmmm, dear, I would, but your damn adverts keep crashing my browser, turning on my speakers to auto-play talk-radio obnoxious videos, and slowing page load to a reluctant I-can't-squeeze-the-information-through-this-tiny-space-left crawl), demands to sign up to mailing lists I'm already signed up to, and the terrible, terrible robot-chat dialogue boxes.

Frequently I do the browser equivalent of storming out of the shop because the shop assistant wouldn't stop saying things to you in a pointed, are-you-actually-a-shoplifter tone. Leave. Me. Alone. I'm just looking.

You don't have to read all of the above, by the way - this 2018 video sums it up nicely, except a few extra pop-ups have been added since then. You can just watch the videos.

If we carry on at this rate, we'll be spending all of our browsing time in Futurama's accessing the internet sketch, drowned in ads, quasi ads and worse, cookie-shackled into endless cycles of saying, YES, I want to access the information on this page.

It might be bearable, I heard someone say on a popular social networking site that does not bother with such things, if there was an option to type 'f*ck off'' into a dialogue box. 

True that. Like them, I frequently find myself typing 'f*ck off'' into imaginary dialogue boxes in my head, especially when I get to the sixth on one website.

So, Firefox. Could you make us a nice browser extension that does that? Pretty please?

Best make the exact wording customisable, though I guess, as lots of cultures are less sweary than the Brits. 

N.B. Grammatical and spelling errors included for extra authenticity.

life on the post-GDPR internet

Ever since GDPR landed, there has been an explosion of websites with full-page privacy flashes on the way in, redirects to unescapable permissions pages and from some providers, denial pages, either subtle (cookie-enforced trap-pages that cannot be passed), deniable (go to my plain-text version!!!!) or outright ("we have decided not to serve users within the European Union").

None of this is coming across as protecting the user, particularly as all those "solutions" bar the outright denial involve granting the sites more rights and permissions than they were previously exercising while withdrawing service to a larger or greater extent. So added to all the sites behind browser-buggering levels of advertising, undismissable startup flashes and paywalls, we now have to add all the sites that got into a strop over GDPR, and in their excitement let their legal and advertising staff trample over their UX and content workers in their rush to smack their users round the head repeatedly while yelling "look what you made us do!!!!!".

Because this is what it feels like. Come on, the world. Plenty of providers were able to look at GDPR, shrug and carry on, because that was what was being done already. No need to go off on a hysterical tizzy, guys - particularly as the horse has bolted here. My data is spattered through your servers, and no amount of privacy notices is going to change that, not now, not tomorrow and not for the future. particularly as I am a fully signed up Google-tithed, LJ-using, open Twitter account carrying, eyes-open-on-Instagram member of the open web.

It's not even shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, It's more like repeatedly slamming the barn door in my face while all my stuff is already strewn all over the grass outside.

Just. Stop it.

the spam filter falls out of sync with online registration requirements

Today's message is brought to you by the colour grey and the letters f, m and s,

Dear [Redacted]

I'm assuming what I am responding to is an automated marketing email that gets sent when someone has started the process of looking at a report but not registered. So I'm not especially expecting a response. However, I do in this circumstance have a thing to say, so I'm going to say it, even though I might be howling into the empty void of a shared inbox in an abandoned marketing department (though the individual name was a nice touch, [Redacted]).

Straightforwardly, I AM interested in looking at your reports. I was slightly disappointed to discover that I have to register my details to do so, but understand that information is often transactional; and be reassured that, though my password lists now run to eight pages, like most adults working in the sector I've grown hardened to this. So here I am, trying to register on your website right now, but it's not going well. Not because I'm unwilling to register (although I am, a little - if's cheeky to call something free when the cost is actually registration and consent to be marketed to) but because though I've certainly started the registration process, I really can't complete it.

The problem occurring is that your verification code emails aren't getting through our spam filters. Yes, yes, yes. I know. Check my spam folder. But in common with many large organisations nowadays, we don't have "spam folders" as such to check (well, I do, but let's leave that aside for now, your verification email won't be in it). Instead, emails considered to be potentially spam are quarantined at server and sent on at midnight for me to review and release if non-suspicious the following morning. It stops about half my spam and quarantines about the same amount of legitimate mail, which is annoying enough that I've put in a service call about it, but tolerable enough that when I was told there was nothing that could be done I accepted it, shrugged and carried on.

But it's just starting to quarantine verification emails, sometimes, now. You're the second site it's done it for. I did a thing for the last site, but for you, I've just let it sit for now. I'll come back to the problem tomorrow. 

If your verification links don't expire, I can just click it tomorrow morning. That would be pretty poor security practice though, and I would expect better of you, [Redacted], even though this bit of your service is barely more than an email-harvest to allow access to faully anonymised content. There's no help available, either specific to registration and log-on, or generally on the site, so any solution would need to be mine, and mine alone. I did, as you always do, that quick time cost vs. information benefit calculation and decided to shelve fixing it until tomorrow and then decide if I wanted to activate a workaround.

Then your email plopped into my inbox, offering to help me realise how many reports you had and how valuable they were, and how I really should register. Trying to win my heart, this with superlatives and oily with salestalk. I only say this, [Redacted] because you are a Marketing Manager, and salestalk is what you do. I mean no criticim. But you see, the trouble is, this spam thing I'm using, it's not something odd or boutique. It's one of the major, major solutions in use in big organisations. What I'm saying, [Redacted], is that it won't just be me. It's going to be lots of people, and this mail is going to go to all those people.

So please, check your stats. Revisit your registration story. And for heaven's sake, rein in or differentiate the follow-up emails. The user isn't always saying f*** this. Sometimes they are saying this is f***ed.

Sincerely,

[insert standard sig here]

will no-one save me from this clip art hell

I am downloading clip-art daily. I have been driven into this dismal corner (bright with the indefinably awful smiles of the determinedly generic) by the strong-arm package bundling of a prominent clip-art sales site. I delegated the purchase decision to a staff member who was briefly passing through. He left me this. The site is extensive, but most of it is very badly tagged. A depressing number of pages toss away their descriptive space on misspellings and waste words like handsome, beautiful, fresh, sexy, pretty, etc. I go back to chasing search terms through a maze of the scrubbed and filtered, trying to find the word for what I'm looking for. It's a perfect tidy-up job for the Mechanical  Turk, but why would they bother? Forced constant overpayment has me doing the work.

Later, I am trying to show the new staff member Google Analytics. But there is a clip art woman who is stopping me getting to Google Analytics. She smiles gently while I wrestle with my log-in. The browser crashes, like a floundering brontosaur. She doesn't even bother making a snide comment about the paucity of my updates or the make and antiquity of my browser. She just stands there, smiling, using most of my screen, while I stab at the log-in button (now hidden in a tiny ribbon at the top of the screen).

Eventually I get in. Everything's been redesigned, again, in that "you can use me on an i-pad!" look, all shiny, rounded, tasteful and empty like a flagship store no-one can afford to visit. I grind my teeth and get to re-navigating the menus.