Why Every Website Wants You to Accept Cookies Before You've Even Sat Down

I clicked a link to read one article about garden hoses. Before I could see a single word about hoses, I was shown a full-screen wall of text asking me to make eleven separate decisions about "personalised advertising partners." I did not consent to reading a contract. I consented to reading about hoses.

What a cookie banner is actually asking

Underneath the jargon, it's a fairly simple question: is it okay if this site (and often its advertising partners) remembers things about your visit — what you looked at, where you came from, what device you're on — to show you more relevant ads or content later? Some of that tracking pays for the free content you're about to read. Some of it is a lot more than that content strictly needs.

Why there are so many of them

Privacy laws in a number of regions now require sites to ask before tracking you for advertising purposes, which is a genuinely good thing for privacy — the awkward side effect is that nearly every site now greets you with a consent screen, because nearly every site uses at least some tracking technology, even just to remember your login or your cart.

Getting through them faster

• Look for a "reject non-essential" or "manage preferences" option — it's often one click away from the big green "accept all" button.
• Strictly necessary cookies (login, cart, security) don't usually need your consent — it's the advertising and analytics ones that do.
• Most browsers let you clear cookies periodically, which resets the tracking without requiring you to read a wall of text about it every time.

For what it's worth, this site asks too — but we keep the necessary bits limited to running the site, and the choice about analytics and marketing is genuinely optional and easy to change later from the footer. Not every banner is created equal. Some of them are just three questions wearing a trench coat made of legal text.