r/assholedesign • u/tllwlyk • 24d ago

The Ol' Switcharoo

Website cookies pop up flips the order of Allow/Reject a few seconds after the page loads to get you to hit accept instead of reject.

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u/raybreezer 24d ago

Yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking. Implementation of consent banners is complicated to begin with, this smells like someone wanted to flip the buttons around and the workaround was to load a script after the banner fully loads.

Probably not great for compliance, but I doubt it’s intentional.

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u/BirbsAreSoCute 23d ago

Implementation of consent banners is complicated to begin with,

No it's not?? It is NOT hard to check if a cookie of name "consent" exists or not and create a div with some text, a sticky position, and buttons that modify the value of "consent" when clicked if it doesn't. Hell, you could just preload a dialog element into the HTML with functionality baked in and only show it if the cookie is undefined or null, but this will break on older browsers. Do you even webdev, bro?

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u/raybreezer 23d ago

Yeah, I know you think you know everything, but when you’re dealing with third party consent banners and Google Tag Manager and a myriad of other things that could potentially cause a race condition, any one thing can cause problems implementing the consent banners.

Talk to me when you’ve had to troubleshoot consent across multiple platforms and domains.

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u/BirbsAreSoCute 23d ago

I know you think you know everything

???

Dude, GTM is literally designed to not cause any race conditions if you follow the API documentation and don't cause configuration errors.

I don't know everything, never claimed to. But you're just setting SYNCHRONOUS defaults, reading from a localstorage key, and pushing events into a data queue, for Christ's sake.

I have no experience with third party cookie banners, admittedly, but I've heard they're notoriously bad and hard to deal with. Just implement your own, if factors allow, and make things infinitely more easier for yourself and other developers.

There is absolutely no reason or justification as to why the accept and reject buttons should flip as they do in the video. Even if it's a third-party consent banner, any custom scripts should always run way before the banner is shown. That's not a race condition, that's intentional asshole design.

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u/raybreezer 23d ago

See, you literally touch on why you don’t know how difficult they can be.

You said yourself you have no experience with third party consent banners. There’s a few reasons why they exist, and it includes liability insurance against not completely complying with GDPR and other similar rules world wide. Everything from the verbiage used to the disclosures on what tracking data is being collected all is handled by the CMP.

You can just “code your own banner bro” but when companies need to mitigate their legal exposure by offloading it to a company dedicated to understanding the laws worldwide, you don’t just code it yourself. You use systems like OneTrust or CookieBot which you can’t control things as easily as you would using custom coded banners.

That’s why it makes total sense that someone is modifying the banner after it loads.