Notices by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)

In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/11/tragedy-of-the-commoners/#piketty-snowden

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in 2019, there were more people in America struck by lightning than consumers who got monetary awards from an arbitration panel.

Matt Stoller
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-how-to-stop-the

One of 2026's better tech-related coinages is "dickover," John Gruber's term for

> a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/21/dickovers/#block-element

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These are bad everywhere, but they are especially terrible in the UK and EU, where websites practice a form of malicious compliance to the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. Under the GDPR, websites are required to secure your affirmative consent to process your data.

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The obvious way that websites should respond to this is by not collecting your data unless there's a damned good reason for it, but the *actual* response is to repeatedly shove cookie-consent dialogs in your face before letting you use the site.

These are absolutely unnecessary. Your browser can be configured to transmit a "global privacy control signal" by default that tells websites you don't consent to be spied on while you look at their pages:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control

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The website operators falsely claim that they have to do this under the terms of the GDPR (or other laws, like California's CCPA). This is a lie. Every privacy law contains an exception that allows websites to store data about you for a "legitimate interest," and that obviously includes setting a cookie that says, "don't ever spy on this user."

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But many websites punish you by throwing up a "Global Privacy Control detected" dickover that forces you to click through to affirm their confirmation of your confirmation that you don't want to be spied on.

If you don't have the GPC set, websites will demand that you tell them whether you want to be spied on - and they'll do it again, every time you visit them.

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What's a legit interest? Well, I can tell you what it *isn't*. Facebook claimed that they *had* to spy on you, even if you opted out by laboriously clicking through one of their dickovers or by transmitting a GPC signal to their servers, because you had *also* clicked through their terms of service, which say, "Facebook is going to spy on you with every hour that god sends, from asshole to appetite, abandon hope all ye who enter here" (a direct quote).

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Facebook claims that this is a *contract* with you, whereby the company has *promised* to spy on you, and if they stop, they would be *violating the contract*, which might make you mad, so they are *legally required* to eavesdrop on every conversation you have and follow you everywhere you go:

https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/briefings/2023/07/european-court-of-justice-in-facebook-ruling-clarifies-interplay-between-eu-competition-law-and-data-protections-enforcement.pdf

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This is bullshit, and the European Court of Justice affirmed it. Remember: surveillance advertising companies are happy to stretch the definition of "legitimate interest" to cover "spying on you because our ToS say we will."

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But these same companies insist that "legitimate purpose" can't *possibly* include "remembering the fact that you told us not to spy on you the last time you were here," and so every time you click through to one of many popular websites, you get a dickover, and the only way to make it stop is to "consent" to being spied upon.

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But it doesn't have to be this way. While the right answer to this kind of rampant lawlessness is stonking fines and even the corporate death penalty for repeat offenders, internet users have a myriad of options available to them for banishing dickovers to the scrapheap of history. These measures aren't difficult to avail yourself of, and using them will make your life infinitely better, so I'm going to tell you about some of them.

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Before I start, one note: these measures only work on browsers, not apps. An app is a webpage wrapped in the right kind of IP law to make it a felony to change how it works, which is why companies are infinitely horny to get you to use their apps, not their websites:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

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What's more, these measures really only work on *desktop* browsers, because mobile browsers are apps, and are severely limited by law and mobile operating systems, making it hard-to-impossible to customize them so that they'll respect your rights. This is true of all mobile browsers, but it goes triple for iOS (iPhones and iPads):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

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Finally, this mostly only works on *Firefox*, and it works *worst* on Chrome, Google's monopolistic browser. When it comes to customizing your browsing experience to get rid of annoyances like dickovers and ads, Chrome is hands-down the worst choice, and Google is about to make it much, much worse, forcing a change that will kill the most popular blockers. Stop using Chrome, switch to Firefox:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

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So, once you're on your actual computer, using Firefox, how can you disenshittify your internet experience? The first thing to familiarize yourself with is Reader Mode, a built-in Firefox feature that switches any webpage to a black type/white background column of text. Just click the little "page view" icon next to the Firefox location bar or use the key combo "ctrl-alt-r."

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Some power tips for Reader Mode: Firefox tries to guess whether a page should have a Reader Mode option based on its layout. This sometimes blocks Reader Mode on pages that badly need it. You can force Firefox to *always* allow you to try Reader Mode by going to "about:config" in your location bar, then searching for "reader.parse-on-load.force-enabled" and toggling it to "true". If you switch to Reader Mode and the page breaks, you can switch back by hitting ctrl-alt-r again.

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Many websites' "soft paywalls" (which allow you to read an article or two before getting a demand to register and/or pay) can be defeated with Reader Mode. Just hit ctrl-alt-r and see if the whole article appears. If it doesn't, try one or both of: a) reloading the page while still in Reader Mode, and/or; b) Clearing cookies for the page (click the shield next to the site's URL in Firefox's location bar, then click "Clear cookies and site data"), and then reload.

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Just click the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet and all the static elements in the current tab go away. This includes things like navigation bars, which are often (but not always) useless annoyances. The original Kill Sticky, created by Alisdair McDiarmid, is 13 years old, and it still works great, but eight years ago, gala8y created a new version that caught some outliers that the original Kill Sticky missed.

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