Opera Touch for Android: How to Block Cookie Notifications

Everyone who’s ever used the internet will be familiar with the cookie notices that most websites display. These cookie notices are the result of the EU’s directive 2009/136/EC also known as the cookie law.

In response to privacy concerns about the use of cookies for the purpose of tracking people’s activity online, the EU passed a law requiring websites to obtain informed consent to save cookies on people’s devices. This law has led to almost every website displaying a cookie notice informing you that the site uses cookies.

Unfortunately, the law didn’t really achieve any of its goals and ended up simply frustrating users. The law was designed to ensure that users were aware of what data was being tracked and how. I reality though, no-one reads the notices and instead simply clicks through the warning as they’ve seen too many and just ignore them now. This situation technically makes the situation worse, training users to click through warnings and messages makes it easier for hackers to trick users into clicking on malicious content.

Realistically, for the vast majority of users, cookie notifications are simply annoying. The Opera Touch browser on Android offers a novel option to deal with this issue. It has an optional feature that can block cookie notifications.

To configure the cookie notification blocking you need to use the in-app settings. To be able to access these, you first need to tap the Opera icon in the bottom-right corner.

Next, tap “Settings”, near the bottom of the popup menu that appeared, to open the settings.

In the settings list, tap “Block cookie dialogs” to configure the cookie notification blocking settings.

There are two settings to configure on the “Block cookie dialogs” page. The first, “Block cookie dialogs”, is a simple slider to enable the feature. The second option, “Automatically accept cookie dialogs”, is a checkbox used to configure if the cookie dialog is hidden or if the browser should attempt to automatically accept the use of cookies.