Why does this website have a loading screen to process my cookie preferences?
I have never seen this before. Usually once I click my preferences the screen just goes away. What’s the difference between those websites and this one?
Yeah, but you can do this in the background without blocking the whole page. In fact you have to go to extra lengths to make it “block” the whole page. Maybe it’s just some css that sets the cursor to the “loading” image, and then ignores mouse clicks for a while, giving the illusion of doing lots of work…
I would suspect this is an intentional dark pattern. They’re probably hoping most people will get tired of waiting and click cancel, which sets it back to the default of allowing all cookies.
Usually, your consent is a simple yes/no flag, no and saving that in a cookie is enough.
I have seen this “processing” before. My assumption was that it sets cookies on third parties websites instead of only the one you visit. The basis for that assumption being that some ad network and tracker websites have/offer “opt out cookies”.
I haven’t checked whether that’s actually the case.
There is no other reasonably valid explanation for it. Setting a few cookies doesn’t take that much time. It would then be either intentionally slow and lying to you, or has horrendous unacceptable implementation (which could be seen as unlikely given how obviously customer facing it is).
Unfortunately, it's definitively an instance of intentional design. This whole consent dialog thing became a booming "consent management platform" industry. Many of them advertise better acceptance rates than the competition, or used to but have removed those claims in more recent times now that the big GDPR boom is over.
This particular dialog is TrustArc, who are infamous. At one point they defended it with a "well, we gotta retry if it fails to make sure your preference is expected, and we can't know if your adblocker is causing it to fail or if it's just a fluke", which is one of those things where they say something that's not totally wrong but you know they're lying through their teeth.
Excluding any dark pattern shenanigans from Frito Lay, the probable answer is that IT systems for large companies are a massive iceberg/rats nest.
The website you see is probably half a dozen different systems wearing a trenchcoat - the news section is probably a different piece of software to the “our products” section and a different piece again to the “contact us”. It’s not inconceivable that this site might be pulling data from 4 different backends and pushing analytics and behaviour data to 10 different systems run by 4 different companies and actually genuinely have to spend a few seconds querying different places to figure out if you’ve opted out anywhere
They’re using a third party platform to do their cookie consent, you are just downloading it from that trust arc website. Which probably makes sense because they probably have most of their cookies coming from third party ad networks.
Well, optimistically I’d say shitty web stuff, in the current climate I postulate also a little time-out for you to properly hit cancel out of frustration.
Data is so valuable to companies. I’m pretty sure this is just a way to get people to rage quit/hit cancel.
That being said, it might not be Rold Gold’s fault. They might just contract out for this service. I swear I’ve seen that processing pop up before and I don’t think I’ve been to Rold Gold’s website, which makes me think it’s a service from a third party
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