Cookies and consent: why ePrivacy matters for our browsing life

Pop-up, click, accept

Every day, millions of people are greeted by cookie banners asking them to accept, reject, customise, manage, review, reconsider their privacy preferences. Most of us are not making carefully considered decisions. We’re simply trying to read an article, buy a train ticket, check the weather, or watch a video.

And yet, hidden behind these seemingly harmless pop-ups lies one of the most important conversations about the future of our digital lives.

That conversation is about ePrivacy. It sounds very technical but, in reality, it affects almost everyone who uses the internet.

While the GDPR governs the processing of personal data, ePrivacy focuses on the confidentiality of our digital communications and the technologies that interact with our devices. It shapes the rules around cookies, online tracking, digital identifiers, and the countless mechanisms that observe, remember, and analyse our behaviour online.

In theory, these rules exist to empower people. In practice, the experience often feels very different.

A way out from the endless clicking maze

Throughout the years, the internet became a place where exercising your rights requires navigating a maze of banners, settings menus, and consent requests. What was meant to provide transparency has, in many cases, become a source of fatigue. Privacy is presented as a choice, but that choice is frequently buried beneath layers of complexity, nudging, and endless clicking.

The result is a paradox: we have more consent prompts than ever before, yet many users feel less informed and less in control of their own choices when browsing.

The European Commission’s Digital Omnibus proposal has reopened an important debate about how privacy rights should actually work online. One provision in particular – Article 88b – asks: why are we still forcing people to negotiate their privacy choices website by website, banner by banner? By enabling machine-readable communication of privacy preferences, the proposal could help move Europe beyond today’s endless consent clicks and towards a digital environment where rights are respected by design.

With this leaflet, we cut through the jargon and explain what cookies, tracking technologies, consent and ePrivacy mean in everyday life, helping you to understand the issues at stake and the opportunities that lie ahead.

We have all the tools to make privacy a feature built into the fabric of the digital world itself and make users’ choices meaningful again.