Privacy groups launch campaign for eliminating cookie banners

An international coalition of civil society organizations across Europe has launched an online campaign to permanently get rid of cookie banners.

A handful of civil rights movements and consumer organizations argue that cookie banners are deliberately designed to mislead people into giving up their right not to be tracked.

For example, cookie banners are notorious for their deceptive design, tricking people to make choices they normally wouldn’t make. Making the “Accept all cookies” button more prominent than the “Reject all cookies” button is an example of a so-called dark pattern.

The same can be said about deceptive color usage with the accept and reject buttons, hiding the reject option, or making it harder to withdraw consent than it was to give.

“You may think that EU privacy law requires cookie banners. But the law is clear: online tracking is prohibited by default. Therefore, the tracking industry needs you to waive your rights. That’s why they invented cookie banners, which often are deliberately misleading as well as annoying,” the coalition states.

Back in 2025, the European Commission came with a solution to eliminate the dreaded cookie banners: automated signals that communicate your privacy preferences between your device and websites or apps.

This idea is neither new nor complex and would be a simple solution to the cookie banner problem, the civil rights movements and consumer organizations argue.

“But the tracking industry seems afraid that if you can express your preferences efficiently, it could result in lower consent rates for tracking,” the coalition says.

The abolition of cookie banners was at hand, but a powerful group of lobbyists has convinced a few EU Member States, including France, Germany, and Poland, that terminating cookie banners would harm online advertising. Therefore, the proposal to get rid of cookie banners has been removed from the Digital Omnibus.

On top of that, industry groups are also lobbying the European Parliament to reject the proposal.

To get the proposal back on the agenda, a coalition of civil rights movements and consumer organizations have launched the #KillTheCookieBanner! campaign. The participants are calling on people to contact their representatives in the European Parliament and express their frustration about cookie banners.

Some of the partners who have joined forces are The European Consumer Organization (BEUC), Civil Liberties Union for Europe, EDRi, and noyb.