I Hate Cookie Consent

The piece argues that cookie banners often create the appearance of consent without preventing advertising tracking. In a scan of 13,712 randomly selected websites that loaded successfully, 6,955 displayed a consent banner. On 1,662 of those sites (23.9%), advertising tracking was already active while the banner remained unanswered: 1,512 sent an advertising request and 150 stored an advertising identifier cookie. The first ad request arrived a median of 1.8 seconds after page load, and three-quarters arrived within 2.6 seconds. Meta and Google were the most common early trackers, appearing on 827 and 741 banner sites respectively; OpenAI appeared on 111.

Testing used fresh Chrome profiles, with no clicks or other interaction, and counted answered advertising requests or known advertising cookies - not merely loaded scripts. Google requests explicitly marked as consent-denied were excluded. Examples show banners with marketing options unticked while ad requests and identifiers were already active, including one retailer where the same four advertising platforms continued sending requests after “Reject All.” The problem was not limited to banners that offered no real choice: tracking was active on 23.2% of sites with a reject or settings option, compared with 27.4% of “OK” or “Accept” notices. The findings describe what happened before consent, though the test did not establish whether trackers started before or after each banner appeared.