The End of EU-Imposed Cookie Consent Pop-Ups Could be Nigh
upstart writes:
The plague of cookie consent alerts, banners, and pop-ups that have added a sliver of sandpaper to web surfing since 2009 might be eradicated in December. The European Commission (EC) intends to revise a law called the e-Privacy Directive, reports Politico. Specifically, new guidelines from the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) aim to eliminate manipulative consent banners and reduce consent fatigue.
Cookies are a necessary part of the World Wide Web, which seasoned surfers will have first become aware of in troubleshooting - fixing issues by clearing cookies and so on. However, after the e-Privacy Directive came into force in the late noughties, cookies soon became a source of persistent irritation. The directive required website holders to get consent from visitors unless the cookies were strictly necessary.
Now, in 2025, and if you refresh your browser or buy a new computer/device, you'll face days and days of cookie clickspamageddon to return to smooth surfing on your familiar sites. We know there are browser extensions designed to ignore cookies, but they can have their own trade-offs with privacy, and/or compatibility wrinkles.
Politico shares a quote from Peter Craddock, a data lawyer with Keller and Heckman, which highlights the problem with the current state of cookie consent regulations. "Too much consent basically kills consent," remarked Craddock. "People are used to giving consent for everything, so they might stop reading things in as much detail, and if consent is the default for everything, it's no longer perceived in the same way by users."
[...] In practice, some of the changes we look forward to could be the hinted extremely clear 'reject all' button, which must be as prominent as any 'accept all' option, on all sites. Allowing browser-level consent preferences might be the biggest time saver of all, though. We'll see how browser makers tune and allow for granular control here.
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