Seriously, when are website designers going to realise that setting lots of cookies and then asking for consent is the wrong way round? I mean, surely the concept is clear. Unless the cookie is strictly necessary, for example to carry out the function requested by the user, don’t set the darn thing until consent is gained. To me this is like someone plastering advertising stickers all over your car and then finding you and asking if it’s ok, versus someone asking ‘hey can I put these advertising stickers on your car?’

As I’ve said before, there are some truly excellent cookie consent mechanisms out there now, and some truly awful ones, and every mix in between. I’ve seen one recently that sets out your options at the bottom of the page rather than send you off to another page, and they were all pre-unchecked. And another, a cookie wall this time (to be banned soon!) where you either accept or go off to a completely different website run by an advertising agency, only to be told you then need to tell your browser to reject cookies. One had a list of about 400 partner sites and you had to deselect each, one very similar had the same but you could deselect them all in one go. But in each case they were selected by default and consent is gained basically by user frustration – click Yes just to get somewhere, anywhere.

Of course, you can always empty your browser’s cookie cache regularly as I do. But then you run the risk of Google asking you to go through their consent stuff for the umpteenth time because you deleted the cookie they set that remembers your answers. That’s understandable, but still frustrating. Browsers could use a mechanism by where you clear out everything except a few you chose specifically to persist, and have a button on the menu bar to clear them too so you do not need to go diving into the menus.