Exactly. I use the "I don't care about cookies" extension, which rejects most cookies automatically without me having to see the popups. But even accepting cookies is fine - I'll be closing my browser soon anyway and they'll be gone.
Sure, your browser cookie will be gone. But you have already allowed the server-side identifiers of your session to be used for whatever purpose, including reconstituting increasingly larger parts of your identity over multiple disconnected sessions. Please don't make the mistake of thinking that clearing your cookies afterwards is the same as rejecting all server-side processing.
They'll have my IP and browser fingerprint. Using Firefox mobile narrows me down to 1-2% of the world, but also lets me run ad blockers and noscript, to block some of the more troublesome trackers.
It's all tradeoffs...
My company scanned 209 European regulated sites in June, and roughly 7 in 10 had tracking that wasn't correctly gated by consent. It's rarely indifference, though. DPOs in the EU hold too much weight for that. It's usually a tag added that was never wired into the CMP or something added by a dev or LLM without going through proper review
Full disclosure: I run https://consentmark.com, which measures what tags actually fire under each consent state to create evidence packs companies can show regulators
> something added by a dev or LLM without going through proper review
FWIW, this was a problem long before LLMs were a thing, and it didn't get worse with LLMs. If anything, I'd expect LLMs to get it right by default, because ones ~everyone is using are all trained straight, they won't just silently read between the lines and write code/configs to facilitate one's illegal business model.
That honestly doesn't fit our data or my experience. In our scanning, about 60% of the misconfigured sites had a CMP with blocking active but one or two tags bypassing consent controls
Generally those misconfigurations aren't valuable to the business. We don't see for example lots of ad targeting and conversion tracking firing without consent on an otherwise compliant site.
What we do see is things like sites with CMPs generally working, but one or two analytics events tags firing because consent wasn't properly added to a trigger, or embedded Youtube cookies set without consent, or unexpected data from a URL or query param being accidentally ingested by tracking, or devs adding performance monitoring or observability tools to applications without realising the compliance implications
There's not much business logic in paying for a CMP, blocking your own ad stack, but then letting three analytics events pass through
> FWIW, this was a problem long before LLMs were a thing, and it didn't get worse with LLMs.
This isn't supported by our experience. In the last 18 months, we've seen a big increase in ungated tracking that we catch in CI (albeit with overall much higher velocity in general). LLMs will happily add non-compliant tracking to sites, often following defaults that might be acceptable in the US but not EU. If you push back, they'll also happily implement compliant tracking, but it's definitely not the natural default you can rely on
But your comment left me curious, so I just ran an experiment via Codex -p (gpt-5.6-sol) and Opus 5 via Bedrock
Codex returned the vendor quickstart on 5 of 5 neutral prompts. It gated properly when told the company is Irish, with full Consent Mode v2 defaults denied, GA4 only mounting after consent, with a reject button
So models can produce compliant/non-compliant code based on the context you give them, which reflects what we've seen in industry
Our business is giving devs and increasingly LLMs efficient tests to check the tracking they add is as expected for the EU and then providing signed evidence packs that prove that behaviour at a given time
Clicking those "REJECT!" buttons might make you feel empowered, but it's pointless. Just set your browser to delete all the cookies at the end of the session except for whatever sites you want to allow to 'remember' you.
The whole thing has always been a problem to be properly solved by the browser, and it's probably just the fact that Google makes the only browser that matters, that it's been foisted upon every website owner, who mostly just wants basic analytics and to track conversions from the ads they run, and isn't "selling your data."
The browser is your user agent. If it's sending any information up to web servers on every request that isn't okay with you, why are you using it?