Tired of cookie pop-ups on websites? Good news for internet users annoyed with the consent banners

Cookies are almost universally beloved. Cookie pop-ups, er, rather less so. And if it’s your first time visiting us here at AS USA, sorry for pop-up you just had to click to get to the content.

Internet cookies (see below for why they are called cookies) are actually neat - they hold visitor information for websites and ensure basic functions work, like remembering your username. But they can also be used for gathering visitor data, in which case they cause security issues, particularly when that information is sold to third parties and used for targeted advertising.

Why are there so many pop-ups for cookies?

The European Union, which is far more aggressive about regulating the tech sphere than law makers here in the US, decided to try and fix the situation by making users aware of what cookies were being used on each website and so enacted a broad cookie law in 2009. Under this law, websites have to ask European visitors for consent to use cookies. Because it’s easier to create one worldwide website many companies just show the pop-ups to everyone, hence Americans have been affected by the law too.

The problem is that when every website shows you a lengthy pop-up, people just get fatigued by them and end up clicking yes to everything in order to make the pop-ups go away and get to the juicy content they are after.

EU decides cookie pop-ups aren’t helping

The EU have now decided that the pop-ups as implemented are not actually helping users, and are planning to change the rules to make it simpler. The European Commission wants to put together an integral fix for this December, which would cut pop-up fatigue, but exactly how it will work is yet to be thrashed out.

One idea is to let people set cookie preferences once (think browser settings), not every single time they load a page. The EU is also talking about more carve-outs for the harmless stuff that keeps a site running or gives simple anonymous stats.

EU countries are nudging the same way. Denmark has floated skipping banners for “technically necessary” cookies and basic statistics, while keeping the stricter rules for marketing, behavioral ads, and sharing data with third parties.

Industry, of course, has a different wish list. Ad groups would like to fold cookie rules into the GDPR’s risk-based model, which would let companies use bases like “legitimate interest.” Privacy groups hate that idea. Their view: the banner isn’t the real problem, surveillance advertising is. Expand “essential” too far and you smuggle in analytics and personalization by the back door.

If you have déjà vu, you’re not wrong. The last big attempt to replace the cookie law stalled for years and was pulled earlier this year. Round two is now loading, with a bigger fight teed up next year when the Commission rolls out the Digital Fairness Act, a new rulebook aimed at manipulative design and sketchy personalization.

So, fingers crossed the Commission comes up with something that reduces the number of cookie pop-ups and that that has a worldwide impact.

Why are cookies called cookies anyway?

The term cookie harks back to 1970s programming culture. Early Unix hackers used the term “magic cookie”, based on fortune cookies and magic numbers, for a small, opaque token that could be used to “magically” prove who you are or what session you’re in.

When Netscape engineer Lou Montulli introduced HTTP cookies in 1994 to add “memory” to websites, the browser did the same thing: save a tiny token from a site and return it on later requests. The name stuck because the behavior matched the magic-cookie idea, and people also liked the “fortune cookie” analogy of a small packet containing a little piece of information.

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