Accept cookies or pay? No thanks

One of my biggest pet peeves when visiting most commercial websites these days is the inevitable data privacy modal dialogue box that pops up on the screen. The second you land on the site, you'll be faced with a pop-up asking whether you would like to accept cookies and share your data with 15,324 partners. Why yes, that sounds lovely. The best popups have a "Refuse all" button somewhere on the modal - ideally a prominent button, but sometimes a tiny text link hidden at the top of the page. It's not the end of the world, you just click on the button and the modal closes. Worse are the pop-ups that make you wait while they "apply your preferences" (almost certainly complete nonsense in my professional opinion as a software engineer). Worse still are the ones which make you go through individually and manually opt out one company at a time. But wait... can we make it even shittier? Of course we can. They say capitalism breeds innovation, and data privacy pop-ups are no exception. In…