It even has the approval of my wife.

He is the chosen one! Hail him!

Feels like another hate-pushing cesspit to avoid.

The point people are making is that communication and discipline, both things that require time and skill, would be a better, less invasive approach.

Perhaps that’s being done as well?

But even if it is, that approach doesn’t work with all people, no matter how skillful or how much time is put into it.

True - although just because you are paranoid, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you…

And hopefully will continue to be asked, because one day it may not be poor OPSEC.

In my experience, /most/ people don’t care and further, they don’t want to care.

Even those that do care have to exist on a sliding scale of compromise in order to function.

since the plain text isnt stored

I’m not sure I’d accept a bet on that assumption.

In my experience, the AI bots are absolutely not honoring robots.txt - and there are literally hundreds of unique ones. Everyone and their dog has unleashed AI/LLM harvesters over the past year without much thought to the impact to low bandwidth sites.

Many of them aren’t even identifying themselves as AI bots, but faking human user-agents.

robots.txt does not work. I don’t think it ever has - it’s an honour system with no penalty for ignoring it.

I have a few low traffic sites hosted at home, and when a crawler takes an interest they can totally flood my connection. I’m using cloudflare and being incredibly aggressive with my filtering but so many bots are ignoring robots.txt as well as lying about who they are with humanesque UAs that it’s having a real impact on my ability to provide the sites for humans.

Over the past year it’s got around ten times worse. I woke up this morning to find my connection at a crawl and on checking the logs, AmazonBot has been hitting one site 12000 times an hour, and that’s one of the more well-behaved bots. But there’s thousands and thousands of them.

If cookie prompts annoy you (and why wouldn’t they? Complicated and time wasting prompts caused by terrible and compromised legislation that’s led to far more intrusion instead of enforcing use of browser settings) and you don’t care about cookies, then the browser extension “I don’t care about cookies” suppresses the vast majority.

But UK laws do, which share a lot of commonality - like the GDPR

I think this type of scheme is illegal under the GDPR, which is in effect in the UK just as it is in the EU.

It’s been a while since I worked with the GDPR, but from memory the wording is such that:

The data holder needs to allow people to opt out of data collection. The subject can request to be forgotten. The data holder explicitly cannot charge for this.

But changes move slow, and The Mirror is probably banking on nobody caring enough to complain, and Trading Standards being too underfunded and swamped with other work to investigate otherwise (which they are). If they’re challenged, they’ll just change tack, go “oops” and are unlikely to hit big fines unless they dig in.

Cookie laws are a horrible mess and always have done - the resulting consent banners are far more intrusive than anyone wanted.