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When I visit a SE site which I haven't joined, I get the notification at the bottom of the page:

This site uses cookies to deliver our services and to show you relevant ads and job listings. By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Cookie Policy, Privacy Policy, and our Terms of Service. Your use of Stack Overflow’s Products and Services, including the Stack Overflow Network, is subject to these policies and terms.

Every time I've restarted the browser.

It is tedious to have to dismiss it every time.

I assume the relevant cookie is the one named "se-consent". That cookie is only a session cookie.

Please could the cookie have an expiration date set instead of being a session cookie.

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  • Generally for me this message appears only when using incognito mode and never appeared on already visited websites.
    – Abhishek Gurjar
    Commented Aug 30, 2018 at 10:49
  • @AbhishekGurjar Is the "se-consent" cookie in your browser set to be a session cookie or one with an expiration date? It has to be a site which you haven't joined and you haven't visited since restarting the browser.
    – Andrew Morton
    Commented Aug 30, 2018 at 10:51
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    Isn't the whole point of that cookie consent to be annoying? Raise a complaint with your MEP to have the legislation surrounding this topic to be brought back to normal proportions. I think the only correct thing to do is to not store any cookie when a session ends if you have no way to store a users preference. Those sites that don't annoy you, probably break the law and are subject to a fine.
    – rene
    Commented Aug 30, 2018 at 11:17
  • @rene But they do have a way to store the consent cookie beyond the current browser session. By using the site, I have given them consent to do so.
    – Andrew Morton
    Commented Aug 30, 2018 at 11:33
  • But you say you haven't joined that site. You don't have a userprofile on that specific domain.
    – rene
    Commented Aug 30, 2018 at 11:44
  • @rene It says "By using our site," not "By joining this site."
    – Andrew Morton
    Commented Aug 30, 2018 at 11:48

2 Answers 2

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It's better, for us, to simply have the cookie vanish unless you create a profile where we can store all of your preferences, including your consent to let us store them, where you can also use all of the mandated tools at your disposal to control what we store.

As you pointed out, unless you create a profile, your only option is to use a browser extension. We could possibly do this differently, but in all honesty, I don't think we're going to change anything about how we're treating our implementation until a dozen or so cases go through the courts, which is probably going to take quite a while.

The tiny amount of convenience isn't worth potentially weakening compliance. I am 100% open to "We might be interpreting that tiny part incorrectly" and that may be, but we keep coming back to potential cost vs. benefit and there .. just isn't much :)

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  • Is it not possible to use my current Stack Exchange profile?
    – Andrew Morton
    Commented Aug 31, 2018 at 13:55
  • @AndrewMorton It's per-site. While we present an aggregate feed of your network activity as a network 'profile', it's essentially just an aggregate feed. We do have a concept of a root account from which all site profiles stem, but consent is a per site thing, so storing it there wouldn't work. I'm not overly-crazy about the implementation either from a product perspective, but we have to be really careful until the law gets filed down and refined by the courts. As we can make changes to alleviate inconvenience, we certainly will. But it's going to be a while.
    – user50049
    Commented Aug 31, 2018 at 13:59
  • How about a "Remember my acknowledgement across all Stack Exchange sites in this browser" option? The only coding needed to implement that would be to set an expiry date on the se-consent cookie, and it could be done browser-side in JavaScript.
    – Andrew Morton
    Commented Aug 31, 2018 at 14:16
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You can work around this issue by adding an expiration date to the cookie yourself by using a cookie-editing browser add-on.

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