What does a person agree to when they allow all cookies?

[Man]

People don’t read instructions. You almost certainly haven’t read the Windows EULA, haven’t read the iTunes EULA, haven’t read the Linux GPL or any other software.

That’s okay. It’s our nature.

The same thing happens on the internet. Lately, thanks to GDPR and other laws, you’ve often seen pop-up messages asking for permission to use cookies.

Most people click “Agree” and carry on as if nothing happened. Nobody reads privacy policies, right?
Developer Conrad Akunga decided to figure out what specific terms are stipulated by the user agreement. He took the news site Reuters as an example. This is a completely arbitrary example, most other sites have their own rules.

Here are the rules:

Please note the scroll bar. There is more to come.

Six more screens with text

In short, the document informs the user of several things:

• That the website collects and processes data
• That for this he works with various partners
• That the site stores some data on your device using cookies
• That some cookies are strictly necessary (determined by the site) and cannot be switched off.
• Some personal data may be sold to partners to provide relevant content.
• You can personalize ads, but you can't remove them.

The company probably developed all these confusing menus to create a certain semblance of transparency, openness to dialogue. But you still can’t turn off “essential” cookies, because they are necessary for the site to work.

You also can’t turn off advertising completely. So your only choice is to either watch randomly selected ads or ads that the provider thinks may be relevant to you.

And one more point about partners to whom your personal data is sold. The list of partners is common for all sites that cooperate with the IAB.

Who are these “partners”?

If you click on the corresponding button, the following window will appear:

Notice how small the slider on the scroll bar is. There are probably hundreds of them. Below each company name is a link to the privacy policy.

These are not the same links, they are different! Each of them leads to a unique privacy policy for each partner. How many people would actually click on these links manually to read the terms? It’s just unrealistic.

Konrad Akunga used Chrome developer tools to extract the real list of partners with links to each of their privacy policies.

He copied the list and pasted it into VSCode — and got a huge file of 3835 lines, which after formatting ( Alt + Shift + F) broke into a monster of 54,399 lines.

Konrad wrote a program that uses regular expressions to extract the necessary pieces of data — company names with URLs — and generates the result in Markdown format using a template.

Log.Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
.WriteTo.Console()
.CreateLogger();

// Define the regex to extact vendor and url
var reg = new Regex("\"vendor-title\">(?<company>.*?)<.*?vendor-privacy-notice\".*?href=\"(?<url>.*?)\"",
RegexOptions.Compiled);

// Load the vendors into a string, and replace all newlines with spaces to mitigate
// formatting issues from irregular use of the newline
var vendors = File.ReadAllText("vendors.html").Replace(Environment.NewLine, " ");

// Match against the vendors html file
var matches = reg.Matches(vendors);

Log.Information("There were {num} matches", matches.Count);

// extract the vendor number, name and their url, ordering by the name first.
var vendorInfo = matches.OrderBy(match => match.Groups["company"].Value)
.Select((match, index) =>
new
{
Index = index + 1,
Name = match.Groups["company"].Value,
URL = match.Groups["url"].Value
});

// Create a string builder to progressively build the markdown
var sb = new StringBuilder();

// Append headers
sb.AppendLine($"Listing As At 30 December 2020 08:10 GMT");
sb.AppendLine();
sb.AppendLine("|-|Vendor| URL |");
sb.AppendLine("|---|---|---|");

// Append the vendor details
foreach (var vendor in vendorInfo)
sb.AppendLine($"|{vendor.Index}|{vendor.Name}|[{vendor.URL}]({vendor.URL})|");

// Delete existing markdown file, if present
if (File.Exists("vendors.md"))
File.Delete("vendors.md");

//Write markdown to file
File.WriteAllText("vendors.md", sb.ToString());

The result is a list of all partners, and each has its own unique document with privacy terms. Here is the list: vendors.md.

It contains 647 companies.

Obviously, no one will be able to read all these terms before clicking the "Agree" button, the author concludes.

Remember that these advertising providers provide the same services to different sites. They uniquely identify the browser and device, so they can analyze and track your actions on different sites to create the most accurate profile. Large amounts of data are collected on each supposedly anonymous user .

The parsing code from this article is published on Github.

Source