Uncheck all those Tumblr GDPR boxes at once with this cool bookmarklet

You’re most likely sick of the GDPR notifications coming at you via email and the web, but they’re actually great. Or rather, GDPR itself is great. Unlike the EU cookie notices that still seem to pop up in your browser, GDPR is actually useful, and shows the U.S. what happens when government looks after the interests of citizens, not corporations.

Thanks to GDPR, internet giants are being forced to change what they do with all the personal data they harvest from you. And hidden behind those many, many GDPR notices are opt-out lists¹ that let you limit what data these companies can share.

Of course, many of these companies are making it as difficult as possible to actually change these settings. Tumblr, for instance, lists all of the companies to which it supplies your information, and gives no “uncheck all” option.

I got sick of this, so I made a bookmarklet to uncheck all the boxes on any website with just one click.

Shame on you, Tumblr

We’ll use Tumblr as an example, because its new GDPR “compliant” privacy settings are so shamefully obfuscated. To access them, head to Tumblr’s privacy page when logged in. Then, click the link for your Privacy Dashboard. Then follow long with whatever nonsense Tumblr and its current owner Oath forces you to do before you get to the actual page you need. I’d like to give more instructions, but I’ve been unable to access the same pages two days in a row, which means that things are in flux.

What you’re looking for is this link:

Good luck finding it!

Click Manage Options, then click Manage. DO NOT click Accept. Then, click both of those Show links to expand the lists.

Woah, right? According to my non-expert reading of the GDPR laws, this opt-out form is illegal. To be compliant, you have to explicitly opt-in. And Tumblr has made it almost impossible to do. Who wants to click all those boxes?

Javascript bookmarklet to uncheck all those boxes at once.

Instead of checking them all off one-by-one, you can create bookmarklet, and check them all off at once. You can also save the bookmarklet in your favorites bar, and use it on any other site that has too many check boxes.

Here’s the Javascript, which you can paste into a bookmarklet using these instructions.

javascript:\[].forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll('input\[type="checkbox"]'),function(el){el.checked=false})

I’d like to provide a bookmarklet you can just drag up to the bookmarks bar, but WordPress, which we use to publish Cult of Mac, won’t allow it. Instead, click the link above to follow the instructions. You just have to bookmark a page (this one will do), then right-click on the new bookmark, click Edit Address…, and paste in the Javascript. Rename the bookmarklet too, while you’re there.

The GDPR will hopefully put an end to this sort of nonsense, but until it properly kicks in, we will have to use workarounds like this. Still, its a lot more fun that unchecking all those boxes.

1. According to my non-expert reading of the GDPR laws, opt-out forms are illegal. ↩