Since moving to Europe (did you know I live in Europe now? I try to mention it every third post), I've been confronted with constant "Accept our cookies!" pop ups on every page I visit. This is a good thing, on the whole, I think - it's nice for users to be confronted with the reality of tracking, and be able to control that. However, it's really annoying, because the people who control the pages mostly really resent giving the user any options about this and make it as painful as legally possible.
Usually this is pretty straightforward dark patterns stuff - making the "Accept All Cookies" button the one that's most prominent, making you run through confusing menus to do other things, hiding secret things behind drop-downs, etc.
Sometimes you get a page that is very upfront and says "hey, if you don't accept our tracking we're not going to let you browse here". I assume that's legal but it's funny how honest they are about the purpose of their pages. Sometimes US based sites are just not available to people in Europe to avoid having to comply.
The other day I found the highest-effort one I've encountered so far. It had a normal dialog but if you decided not to accept cookies it was like "ok, I need to set your cookie preferences, this might take a while..." and then it had a progress bar thing that counted up slowly towards 100%, with a big friendly prominent CANCEL button. Of course it hung on 99% for several seconds, hoping to get out of letting you escape tracking, but finally "finished" the process of "setting my cookie preferences" and let me see the page.
I think the best thing about these tricks is that they really make clear how the modern internet works and how valuable your data is to the publishers, and expose the lie that all these places are publishing stuff 'for free'.
