Gotta Love Europe

After getting a static IP for my internet connection at home, I decided I had to get a VPN subscription(Mullvad, not a paid endorsement; but man, are they fantastic!).

Using the VPN, I was able to "visit" countries. You'd think you'd see idempotent behavior from websites but, no. They go out of their way to treat us like crap. See for yourself:

consent.google.com? I didn't know Google was capable of saying the C-word

And they ask consent for YouTube too!

You will be greeted by the above webpage when you visit any Google website, search included, for the first time. And Google wasn't the only service that was suddenly privacy-respecting when I switched to Europe.

In my opinion, ad blockers, JavaScript-disabling plugins, and a host of other privacy tools are only trying to compensate for the lack of good policy. And sometimes, no matter how good and technically sound the circumvention mechanisms are, a lack of policies will always come back to bite us.