Tom's Hardware has started doing this too. It's positively user-hostile.

Every website I encounter that does that gets blocked from my Google Discover feed. I haven't managed to be so thorough with my Lemmy link blacklist yet.

Thank you!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdjildafknihdffpkfmmpnpoiajfjnjd

Holy smokes! Thank you very much for mentioning it, dear @slazer2au@lemmy.world ! Since, I try not installing addons that are not published open-sourced, but this one is! ✨

This add-on is built and maintained by workers at Aarhus University in Denmark. We are privacy researchers that got tired of seeing how companies violate the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Because the organisations that enforce the GDPR do not have enough resources, we built this add-on to help them out.

We looked at 680 pop-ups and combined their data processing purposes into 5 categories that you can toggle on or off. Sometimes our categories don't perfectly match those on the website, so then we will choose the more privacy preserving option.

The first version of this add-on works with 4 popular pop-ups: Cookiebot, OneTrust, QuantCast, and TrustArc. The add-on is open source, so anyone can add additional pop-ups through our template system: https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic.
Source

There is also pre-made blocklists for uBlock Origin for Cookie Banners, which you judt have to turn on.

Combine with e.g. Cookie Autodelete to automatically remove cookies, and it's effectively as if you declined.

Well, there was an effort to solve it on a technological level, via the Do Not Track header (DNT). The idea was that when users actively signal they don't want to be tracked, then even in weaker jurisdictions, you can't justify doing it anyways.

But Google and Facebook said outright that they would not honor DNT, which meant virtually no webpages could honor it, since Google Analytics and the Facebook Like-button were omnipresent on the web at that point.
And then Microsoft killed it off for good by enabling it by default in Internet Explorer. That meant the DNT header did not anymore necessarily represent a user actively choosing to not be tracked, so it became meaningless in court.

Well, and after that had failed, the EU came about with the GDPR to solve it with laws.
But here it also needs to be said that a cookie banner is effectively only required, if you implement tracking.[^1]
But of course, the ad industry did not want webpage owners to realize they could avoid needing a cookie banner by removing ads or going for non-tracking ads, so they spread a whole bunch of FUD.

And now we're here, with cookie banners virtually everywhere, which are often not even GDPR-compliant either (like the PC Gamer cookie banner here), since it's supposed to be just as easy to decline, as it is to accept. If it is not, then that's not legally consent, because consent has to be freely given.

TL;DR: Ad industry bad.

[^1]: Cookie banners are only ever relevant for personal data (because the GDPR is). And you don't either need them when the user has implicitly given their consent, for example when they put something into their shopping cart, then they obviously consent to you storing their shopping cart contents for the purpose of purchasing those items.

They're pretty good for staying logged in

I think technical cookies are allowed, and this is just 'asshole design'

Of course, thank you, and I do realize that, but:

1. I tried selecting sections that where not associated with othe vendors - same result;

2. Shouldn't it still be allowed to store cookies for the same vendor/domain, without any consent, by default.

3. There are other means/API than cookies to store consent state in common browsers, including: LocalStorage, IndexedDB, SessionStorage, CacheStorage etc.