The cookie banner tax

Open any news site on your phone in the morning. There is a headline, briefly, and then there is the banner. It is grey, beige or an alarming shade of yellow. It wants to know whether you accept all cookies, manage preferences, or scroll down to a list of 847 trusted partners who would also like to know where you are, right now, before you have had a sip of tea.

You tap something. The banner goes away. The page loads. You have read a headline and signed, in effect, a short treaty with a marketing consortium you have never heard of. The cost of each one is small. A second. Two seconds, if the design is bad. Over the course of a year, with the ordinary pattern of a British person reading the news on the way to work, this adds up to several hours of your life spent closing little boxes.

What the law actually asked for

The Information Commissioner's Office is quite clear, and has been for a while. Websites have to tell people when they set cookies, explain what the cookies do, and get consent that is a real decision and not a tired tap. That is the rule. It does not demand a banner the size of a coat. It does not require you to scroll through a list of advertisers. It just says: be honest, and let people say no.

The ICO’s plain-English page for readers is almost quaint. A cookie is a small file your browser keeps. Some are needed to make the site work. Some are there so an ad company can follow you. You should be able to turn the second kind off.

So why is every banner so awful?

Two reasons, mostly. The first is that nobody wants to be the only site that behaves. If every rival site makes it one tap to accept and six taps to refuse, the site that puts refuse in large friendly letters at the top is the site that measurably loses revenue by the end of the quarter. The second is that the rules are enforced slowly and rarely, so the cost of a bad banner is low, and the design brief is get consent, whatever that takes.

In short, the banner is a polite shakedown. It is not quite illegal. It is not the law the regulator wrote. It is the design that lives in the gap between.

The small escapes

You cannot fix this in general. You can fix it on your own phone, mostly, with small moves that cost nothing and add up quickly.

• Pick a browser with tracker blocking on by default. Firefox, Safari and the privacy-focused browsers on iOS and Android all block third-party trackers unless you say otherwise. This does not make every banner disappear, but it removes most of the point of them.
• Install one content blocker you trust, and leave it alone. The good ones are free, open-source and maintained by people who are not selling your data. Add exceptions sparingly for the sites you want to support.
• Use the reader view. Both Safari and Firefox have an on-off switch in the address bar that strips a page down to the article. It skips the banner. The site is still paid by the time the banner would have appeared.
• Pay for one or two things you actually read. A subscription removes the commercial logic for the worst of the banners on the sites you care about. Writers and photographers get paid. Sometimes the banner even gets smaller.

The banner is a cost everyone pays, so that a small industry can measure things it did not need to measure.

What a decent banner looks like

A fair banner is small. It names the categories it covers in a short list. It gives the same visual weight to Accept and Reject. It remembers your answer across the site, and ideally across the week, because grown-ups should not have to tap a banner twice a day. It offers a short link to a longer page for people who actually want to know, and it does not fling the page about the moment you tap anything.

Some sites do this. Most news brands could, if an editor banged a desk. Try to notice the good ones; they deserve it. When a site puts a bad banner in your way, take the half-second to close the tab. It sounds dramatic. It is not. It is just you, with twenty seconds of your day back, visiting somewhere that behaves.

The toll-booth problem

The real issue is cumulative. One banner is a nuisance. A hundred banners a day is a tax on reading the web. That tax falls hardest on the people who can least afford it: older readers for whom the taps are fiddly, and anyone on a slow connection for whom the banner loads several seconds after the headline, forcing a second tap to close it. If you want a plausible reason that British people read less news than they used to, start there.

Where this goes

The Data (Use and Access) Act and the recent round of consultations have promised to simplify the rules for low-risk cookies, which could kill off some of the banners that are entirely about measuring the number of readers. That would be a good thing. It would also, inevitably, be used as cover by sites that want to keep tracking you without asking at all. Watch the box. Watch who is pretending to offer you a choice, and who is giving you one.

Until the banners thin out, the plain reader’s revenge is to use less of the web that behaves worst, and more of the web that behaves well. That is boring advice. It also works. The grumpier you are about the toll-booth, the quicker it disappears.