Confirm My Choices

While attempting to look up the availability of high-speed networking for a relative, I opened my browser to the CenturyLink website the other evening. A panel across the bottom of the screen offered me the choices to accept all cookies or (apparently) refine what I'd accept through "Cookie Choices". I had a look at Cookie Choices, and found that this listed quite a few cookies under the categories Targeting, Performance, Functional and Strictly Necessary, but did not appear to give me any way to indicate that I would decline to accept some or all. It did give me a big blue button to Confirm My Choices. Through the browser's Developer Tools window, I looked to see what I might be missing. I could not tell, though I saw various warnings and an error or two about elements that couldn't be loaded.

The links for the cookie providers did not point to those providers' own websites, but to Cookiepedia, a site based in the United Kingdom. For one of the links I tried, this site appeared to let me decline a vendor's cookies, for couple of other links it did not.  It would have been tedious to click through the long list to decline one out of three cookies.

I have since had another look. Using Inspect Element showed that the different cookie entries were defined as checkboxes, though I could see nothing to check.  In the Chrome Developer Tools console, a check with JQuery showed that there were 67 such entries, though the first seemed to be the element enclosing all the named cookie providers. I experimented with setting the supposed checkboxes to "off", though as far as I could tell without effect. In practice, whether or not I visited the cookie page to try to refine my choices, or chose Accept All Cookies, the site seems to serve up four or five cookies by the time I have gone a couple of pages in.

So I don't know what the whole "Cookie Choices" business is all about. Do the elements appear as checkboxes simply owing to careless reuse of some code? Is there back end logic that renders the checkboxes functional if one arrives with an IP address indicating that one is in the European Union and therefore entitled to GPDR protections? I don't know. But given all this "Confirm My Choices" seems like a taunt.