Blog
Articles
Fines, consent rates, laws explained, and how the product works.Cookie banner fines in 2026: who was fined, how much and why20 October 2026. Fines for cookie and tracker violations keep coming: Google €325 million, Shein €150 million, American Express €1.5 million, and dozens of smaller CNIL sanctions. The reasons repeat.Cookie consent rates: what to expect with an honest banner20 October 2026. With Reject all next to Accept all, expect roughly 55 to 75 percent of visitors who choose to accept, depending on country and audience. The published numbers, and what legitimately moves them.Analytics without a cookie banner: what is actually allowed20 October 2026. In France, audience measurement can run without consent if it only produces anonymous statistics for the publisher, with no cross-site tracking. Matomo, Plausible and Fathom can fit; Google Analytics 4 does not.Dark patterns in cookie banners: what the EDPB calls deceptive design20 October 2026. The EDPB's 2023 guidelines name six families of deceptive design: overloading, skipping, stirring, obstructing, fickle and left in the dark. What each looks like in a cookie banner, and the fines that followed.Why pageview pricing is the wrong model for a cookie banner20 October 2026. Consent tools that charge per pageview make a legal requirement scale with your traffic. A banner costs the same to serve on page one million as on page one. The case for a flat price per site.Consent Mode v2: what changed in March 2024 and what happens without it20 October 2026. Since March 2024, Google requires consent signals (ad_user_data and ad_personalization) for EEA traffic to keep audiences, remarketing and measurement working. Without them, EEA users' data is not processed.First-party vs third-party cookies: what the difference means for consent20 October 2026. A first-party cookie belongs to the site you are on; a third-party cookie belongs to another domain. Consent rules apply to both, because the law looks at the purpose, not the domain.A cookie banner for a static site: Hugo, Astro, Eleventy, Jekyll and plain HTML20 October 2026. Static sites need a cookie banner when they load analytics, fonts or embeds. One script tag in the layout, marked tags for the trackers, no build step. Snippets for Hugo, Astro, Eleventy, Jekyll and plain HTML.The Do Not Sell or Share link: what California requires20 October 2026. If your business sells or shares Californians' personal information, including through ad trackers, you need a Do Not Sell or Share link and must honor Global Privacy Control. Sephora paid $1.2 million for ignoring both.The CNIL cookie guidelines explained: what France expects from your banner20 October 2026. The CNIL's 2020 guidelines and recommendation set the rules much of Europe now follows: no consent by scrolling, Reject all as easy as Accept all, clear purposes, proof of consent. What they say and how they were enforced.The EDPB cookie banner taskforce report: what Europe's regulators agreed on20 October 2026. In January 2023, Europe's data protection authorities published common positions on cookie banners: a reject option on the first layer, no pre-ticked boxes, no reject links buried in text, withdrawal as easy as consent.How the Cookiequiet scanner works (and what it cannot see)20 October 2026. The scanner fetches up to 50 pages, reads scripts, iframes, stylesheets, beacons and Set-Cookie headers, and names what it finds with a database of about 80 providers. It does not run JavaScript, so some cookies are inferred.