“Processing preferences” for half a minute after opting out everything. That was a first 4 me

Works as intended.
The enshittification continues.
- No it didn't, he waited the entire length of 30 seconds. They need to crank that up to 30 minutes!
  "Opt out please"
  NO OPT OUT, FUCK YOU!
  
  "We will notify you by letter when your request to block cookies has gone through and been validated by our manager"

They're lying. They are such awful people that they forced some engineer to make a fake progress tracker, and introduce a timeout to the script to waste your time for opting out. My guess is that they're hoping next time they "forget" your preferences and present you with the same choice, you'll decide not to waste time with the opt out and just accept everything. Scumbag managers.
- If it were a really major site I’d say it’s polling an event log for confirmation from all the other subscribing services that they’ve processed the removal request.
  But this is some local TV station’s website so that doesn’t make sense unless they’ve massively over engineered it.

Oh yeah those cookie prompts are like mini-games to access the content. Some on them, you can't even win!
- "Accept all" or "Click away to a totally different page, select a bunch of items, confirm. Get directed to the homepage which is not where you wanted to be."
  Back button
  
  I've got a suite of plugins that make this essentially anon-issue for me... My browser blocks tracking cookies, and sandboxes by domain
  But still, when I see this screen 50/50 if I immediately hit back on principle

I don't think they're allowed to do these fake loading screens in the EU
PS: in the settings of uBlock Origin, you can select a cookie banner blocker. This gets rid of 99.99% of cookie banners ✨ (there're also options against newsletter boxes).
9 of 10 hacker kittens recommend this 🌸😸
- There's loads of cookie-related things that aren't allowed in the EU, it's a shame nobody really seems to be doing anything about it. I still see non-compliant cookie consent screens all the time here, even on bigger, more well-known websites.
  
  You should report those, because I guarantee that someone is doing something about it.
  Keep in mind that companies outside of the EU that don't reasonably expect to have many visitors from the EU, if at all, might not be held to the same standards as websites that obviously operate in the be EU. We aren't the police of the internet, we can only tell EU countries what to do, so if you browse the American internet for example, you can't expect to have the same level of privacy as the European web.
  
  Have you reported those websites to the appropriate authorities? They’re probably relying on citizen reports to detect violations.
- No idea if it's allowed but I got that exact same popup in Europe.
  
  Maybe it's real then. Maybe the code is just that trash
- Cookie banners that block most of the page also not allowed, but regulations are not enforced, and companies always find loopholes to block their content with annoying cookies banners
- I've at least experienced them in EU. I don't know if the site was outside of EU but that should not really matter
- Yea but from time to time, it’ll just break the entire site. I had a case where for some reason one of the ublock filters removed divs named "privacy" so the whole privacy policy page dissapeared. Happened on a website I was developing and didn’t understand what was happening.
  I think I had this happen on tuta's website as well

- I wish we had options to remove sites like those from search results on search engines
  
  You can do that with some search engines like Kagi.
  
  There is a tampermonkey script. Not sure if it still works.

Yeah - I avoid every website, as soon as I see the "powered by TrustArc™" text...

In the EU you can just block those popups, they waste so much time and are opt-in by law. Not in the wild west though...
- If you block them in America it's illegal probably
  
  It's not.

Android, Firefox, uBlock Origin. You can pick elements and block them just like you can on the desktop.

Did you really think that they could somehow send you the zero required file instantaneously?

I was disgusted and angry the first time (and the second time) I saw that dark pattern. Uhg!
This site tracks these kinds of evils.

just use fire fox and click the botton on the link that turns the article into just markdown
- Can you please elaborate? Where on the link is this button?
  
  its on firefox on the link

That wouldn't be a first for me, it's just the last time I'll ever use their shitty website

Ekill extention might do the trick