Some of you might be using browser extensions to handle the flood of cookie consent banners. Popular choice used to be the browser extension "I don't care about cookies", followed up by "I still don't care about cookies" when the former was bought up by Avast.

These browser extensions try to block the cookie banners from even loading, and if they do, hide them. If the page needs a cookie decision to function properly, the extension will auto-accept either the strictly necessary cookies or all of them, depending on what is easier to detect¹. That's not ideal when you actually want to auto-decline all (or most) of them. It's not necessarily the fault of the extension developers, as many banners make it comically hard to reject even for a human.

The recent Digital Omnibus in the EU officially acknowledged cookie consent fatigue and agreed that more centralized solutions are needed, in which you can preemptively set your decision via device or browser settings that are then transmitted to the website without manually having to answer a banner each time. A concept and a prototype of this is called Advanced Data Protection Control. Germany has also had their own Einwilligungsverwaltungsverordnung (Consent Management Ordinance) in April 2025 about this topic. 

Our Federal Data Protection Authority has officially recognized such a product in October this year, and it apparently already has a silent release in the Google Chrome Store², with an official release in January 2026. It's called ==Consenter==, and is developed by legal tech company Law & Innovation Technology in Berlin. Maximilian von Grafenstein is the initiator of this project and works as a professor at the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK).

Unfortunately, there is one big problem:

It only works with their own solution of cookie banners.

The reason for that is specific German data protection law that Consenter needs to comply with to be officially recognized. Unfortunately, one of them requires that the consent signals these extensions send must be respected. It's often not guaranteed that Consent Management Platforms of websites respect the signal voluntarily, so they felt it necessary to build their own cookie banner solution that would comply with the extension. The success of the system therefore depends heavily on not only users installing the browser extension, but also website owners implementing the corresponding banner.

I don't see that happening on a wide scale. There is zero incentive for website owners (especially businesses) to switch their consent management provider (Atlassian etc.) to comply with this and make it easier for users to deny cookies, when they actually hope the user will accept cookies and gain more data from them. It would be a lot of effort just to lose out on more data.

I expect the initial user experience in January to be abysmal, as this extension will launch with very little websites to actually be compatible with its agent.

If you want a recommendation that works the same way (by letting you select your decision in the extensions' settings) but is compatible with several kinds of consent banners and has been around since 2019, I can recommend Consent-O-Matic. Their store page explains:

This add-on automatically answers consent pop-ups for you, so you can't be manipulated. Set your preferences once, and let the technology do the rest!

This add-on is built and maintained by workers at Aarhus University in Denmark. [...] We looked at 680 pop-ups and combined their data processing purposes into 5 categories that you can toggle on or off. Sometimes our categories don't perfectly match those on the website, so then we will choose the more privacy preserving option.

In general though, I am not a big fan of offloading this to extensions and plugins. That still requires user intervention and knowledge of the existence of them to get these options, when the goal should be that these settings are baked into the device or browser you use already. What we need is browser developers and OS developers implementing consent management, and we need a way to detect whether the consent signal has been respected or not.

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