The end of EU-imposed cookie consent pop-ups could be nigh — consent fatigue and clickspamageddon to be addressed by European Commission amendments to its 2009 e-Privacy Directive

The plague of cookie consent alerts, banners, and pop-ups that have added a sliver of sandpaper to web surfing since 2009 might be eradicated in December. The European Commission (EC) intends to revise a law called the e-Privacy Directive, reports Politico. Specifically, new guidelines from the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) aim to eliminate manipulative consent banners and reduce consent fatigue.

Cookies are a necessary part of the World Wide Web, which seasoned surfers will have first become aware of in troubleshooting – fixing issues by clearing cookies and so on. However, after the e-Privacy Directive came into force in the late noughties, cookies soon became a source of persistent irritation. The directive required website holders to get consent from visitors unless the cookies were strictly necessary.

Now, in 2025, and if you refresh your browser or buy a new computer/device, you’ll face days and days of cookie clickspamageddon to return to smooth surfing on your familiar sites. We know there are browser extensions designed to ignore cookies, but they can have their own trade-offs with privacy, and/or compatibility wrinkles.

Politico shares a quote from Peter Craddock, a data lawyer with Keller and Heckman, which highlights the problem with the current state of cookie consent regulations. “Too much consent basically kills consent,” remarked Craddock. “People are used to giving consent for everything, so they might stop reading things in as much detail, and if consent is the default for everything, it’s no longer perceived in the same way by users.”

The momentum behind the eradication of cookie consent spam has built steadily this year:

• In May, Denmark suggested the dropping of consent banners for cookies that collected data for technically necessary functions or simple statistics purposes.
• On September 15, a note was sent to tech industry players about how the EC is considering changing cookie consent rules to allow for more exceptions.
• On September 22, there was a meeting between the EC and tech industry representatives to discuss cookies and consent banners.
• In December, officials want to present a rewritten directive “scrapping burdensome requirements on digital companies,” says Politico.

The EC is keen to stress that any simplification of cookie consent doesn’t represent a lighter approach to data protection. However, things could be less rigid if cookie regulation were moved to the flexible, risk-based approach behind GDPR.

In practice, some of the changes we look forward to could be the hinted extremely clear ‘reject all’ button, which must be as prominent as any ‘accept all’ option, on all sites. Allowing browser-level consent preferences might be the biggest time saver of all, though. We’ll see how browser makers tune and allow for granular control here.

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