Editing 2432: Manage Your Preferences

{{comic
| number    = 2432
| date      = March 3, 2021
| title     = Manage Your Preferences
| image     = manage_your_preferences.png
| titletext = Manage cookies related to essential site functions, such as keeping Atrus and his sons imprisoned within the page.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by COOKIES KEEPING ATRUS IMPRISONED IN THE PAGE. This page had some confusing and possibly harmful edits that had actual real information in all of them, sorting it out is kind. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. }}

This comic is a play on dialogs that often pop up when you visit a website for the first time, and various other laborious interactions involved in settings required for visiting websites as one prefers.

The 2018 European {{w|General Data Protection Regulation}} (GDPR) and similar laws in other countries require websites to obtain consent from users for collecting personal data not essential to the functioning of the website, and to allow the user from opting out of such data collection. Web advertising agencies often collect as much information as possible about a user in order to display ads that the user is more likely to click on. One method of collecting data is to place small data files, called cookies, in the user's browser that can be used to identify the user across multiple websites.

Website operators have an interest in the user allowing cookies, both because targeted ads make money, and because cookies are used to maintain things like shopping carts and email states. (The latter are often called "cookies related to essential site functions", as seen in the title text, and cannot be turned off.) As a corollary, they have little incentive to make it easy for users to turn off cookies. Thus, in order to obtain the user's consent, many websites will set up a pop-up with the choice between "allow all cookies" and "customise cookies", and choosing the latter option would then require the user to opt out of every tracking cookie separately using "confusingly labeled toggle switches". Randall compares this to ''{{w|Myst}}'', a 1990s puzzle video game. Note that the GDPR states that disapproval regarding what is shown should be as easy to choose as approval: websites and browser vendors doing what is shown in the comic are actually not complying with the GDPR, despite being very rarely raised by the European authorities.

On the other hand, only someone very familiar with internet advertisement and technology would really know what they are agreeing to in these situations. To many users, it just means "agreeing to whatever" so that they can see the website they came to visit.

The black background possibly shows how many sites are providing tools to switch between light and dark backgrounds now. For a long time white backgrounds were the usual default style, and only people who understood esoteric browser configurations could redisplay many things with a black background - possibly to help with perceived eyestrain ''or'' power usage in certain displays. More recently, it is a fashionable setting for content providers to compose as selectable option. It is out-of-place for Randall to show a black background, as many of his comics take place in technical computer systems that often have a black background anyway, as most bare-metal computer terminals still do.

"Atrus" in the title text is the main non-player character in the ''Myst'' series. In the first game these people were imprisoned within books. Pages needed to be collected to complete the books, and it was incredibly hard to find a single page, involving extensive laborious navigation and exploration, and the finding and solving of hidden puzzles. In the ''Myst'' mythos, the books open portals to other worlds, a little like web hyperlinks. Similar to old websites, they were handmade tomes of letters written by people holding rare knowledge and skills.

Some browsers and websites do have actual games embedded within their various configuration interfaces. {{w|Google Chrome|Chrome}}, for example, has the famous {{w|Dinosaur Game|dinosaur game}}.

==Transcript==
:[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk in front of his laptop computer. A black zigzag line points to the screen, and above this is shown what is displayed on Cueball's screen. This is shown as a black rectangle, with a white box, with black frame, overlaid over the top of the black section, extending half way above it. The text in this white box is in gray font. Inside the black rectangle are two gray rectangles, with white borders and black text. A small rectangle at the top has "Manage your Preferences" inside it, and a large rectangle below has 6 lines of text.]
:Agree to whatever 
:Transport me to an immersive Myst-like game where I click confusingly-labeled toggle switches, only some of which work, perhaps never to find my way back to the page I wanted.

==Trivia==
The title-text originally said "Atrius" instead of "Atrus". A few hours after the comic's release, this was changed.
{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Video games]]
[[Category:Internet]]