Why That “Accept All Cookies” Button Is a Privacy Trap

Cookie consent banners have become a common sight on the modern internet. While these banners were meant to offer users a genuine choice to opt out of unnecessary tracking, they’ve increasingly been subverted by dark patterns and manipulative UX design.

The constant bombardment of these consent banners has also made them mostly meaningless, as most regular internet users don’t read or care about them. They simply click the highlighted “Accept All Cookies” option and continue with their browsing, thereby giving away their privacy.

What Are Cookies, Anyway?

Before diving into the problem with “Accept All Cookies,” it’s essential to understand what a cookie is. It’s a tiny file that a website saves on your device. This file is used to remember you and your preferences, among other things. It’s an important part of the whole internet ecosystem and isn’t inherently bad. Cookies can be classified into three major categories: essential, functional, and tracking.

As the name suggests, essential cookies are necessary to deliver a seamless website experience. They remember important details, such as whether you are logged into the website or what items are in your cart. Functional cookies are used to enhance your experience through features that add value to your browsing. For example, a functional cookie would remember details such as your language preference, locale, or preferred currency.

The tracking or advertising cookies are the ones that can be problematic, as they follow you around the internet to track your browsing habits and build a profile that can be used to serve you targeted advertisements.

It’s worth mentioning that cookies aren’t the only tracking mechanism employed on the internet. Browser fingerprinting and server-side tracking can also monitor folks without their explicit consent.

The Problem With “Accept All Cookies”

It’s no coincidence that the “Accept All Cookies” or a similar option is given the most prominent placement on a cookie consent banner. This way, the websites count on you being rushed or distracted and clicking the “Accept All Cookies” option to get on with what you’re doing. However, by selecting “Accept All,” you allow the website to store any cookies it wants, including those for advertising and tracking purposes.

These cookies often originate from third-party ad networks or the website’s tracking partners, allowing them to potentially track your every move across websites, including your browsing history, location, and the topics you read about, as well as the products you browse on different websites. This data profile is then used to show you highly targeted ads, the kind that make you wonder, “How do they know I’m planning a vacation to this place, or I want to buy this exact thing?” It’s not your phone’s microphone listening in, as is often mistakenly suspected; it’s the cookies doing the surveillance.

Besides target advertisements, this data is frequently sold to brokers or repurposed for political targeting. Even when labeled “anonymous,” it can be combined with other identifiers to create a unique digital fingerprint of you, which is pretty hard to shake.

What’s the Solution?

While “Accept All Cookies” is often given prime positioning on most consent banners, you’ll also find options such as “Manage Cookies” or “Customize.” These can be tucked behind additional options or secondary menus, but they are usually present. You can use them to allow only the cookie categories required for the website’s functioning, rather than granting broad permission. Some of the cookie categories that can typically be disabled without impacting a website’s functionality include “Advertising,” “Analytics,” and “Social Media.”

Fortunately, not all websites attempt to trick you into allowing all their cookies and will either give equal prominence to all options or offer a clear “Reject all non-essential cookies” option for easy selection.

Beyond using the cookie consent banner to enforce your choice, you can further protect your privacy by setting your browser to block third-party cookies by default, using Incognito Mode, opting for privacy-focused browsers like Firefox or Brave, and installing extensions like Privacy Badger. These apps and features help limit persistent identifiers and reduce the reach of third-party tracking across the web.

A Change on the Horizon?

Cookie consent banners began as a regulatory effort to empower people, but websites and ad networks have since exploited them, and the EU has recognized that, among other issues with these banners. So, a change may be on the horizon. According to Politico, the EU is exploring reforms to its ePrivacy framework, with one of the proposed changes being to ensure that people only have to set their preferences (preferably in their browser) once, rather than every time they visit a website. There are also proposals to drop consent banners when websites use cookies only for “technically necessary functions” or “simple statistics” to reduce consent fatigue.

However, it may take a while before any changes to the EU Cookie Law are finalized and come into effect. Until then, it’s up to you to protect your privacy.