When you present website visitors with a cookie consent banner, they might have the option to reject some or all non-essential cookies.
When they submit this choice through your consent banner, it tells your website to refrain from deploying the unapproved cookies on their browser or device. This means no analytics or advertising cookies get placed, and you won’t collect data about this individual user or their browsing activities.
Essential cookies that make website work will still deploy as necessary.
This is part of Termly’s ‘Ask the Privacy Experts’ series, where a member of our team briefly answers one of the top questions we hear from businesses about how data privacy and consent management impacts them.
Does My Business Lose Data When Someone Rejects Cookies?
Depending on what cookies are rejected by a user, your business might not collect the following information about them:
- Internet browsing data
- Search history
- How they landed on the page/where they came from
- How long they stayed on the page
- What they interacted with on your site
- Personal details (name, age, address, email address, birthdate, etc.)
Allowing users to reject cookies is sometimes required by privacy laws and protects the privacy of the user, like the CCPA, which gives users the right to opt out of targeted advertising and the sale or sharing of their data.
While your business might lose data about a person if they reject cookies, the information you do collect will likely be higher quality, more accurate, and overall, more useful because it’s coming from people who accept and allow for the data processing.
Solutions like Google Consent Mode, the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework, and Microsoft UET Consent Mode can also help fill these data gaps with smart data mapping while still honoring user privacy and cookie consent choices.
How Does Rejecting Cookies Affect Sales, Marketing, or Analytics?
When a user rejects cookies, it can affect data sets you might use to guide your marketing campaigns.
This causes businesses to worry about under-reported traffic, broken user journeys, and loss of attributions because this can lead to ineffective retargeting, wasted ad spending, and even impaired personalization.
However, if a user has the legal right to opt out of targeted advertising and personalization, following through on this right is not technically impairing personalization. Those who want to participate have the right to still do so, and those who are not interested get to opt out, leaving you with higher quality data.
It’s also important to remember that all websites are subject to the same legal requirements and thresholds. It doesn’t just impact one type of business.
Are More People Rejecting Cookies Today?
The rate of people rejecting cookies today is higher, but this is largely because, in the past, people did not have the option or means to opt out.
Data privacy laws are relatively new. The GDPR only became enforceable in 2018. The CCPA entered into force in 2020.
Since then, the legal landscape has grown at a rapid rate. In the U.S. alone, over 20 more states have enacted unique consumer data privacy laws.
When comparing consent data to past years, you must take into consideration what privacy laws were in force, who they protected, and what they outlined as cookie consent requirements and consumer rights.
Why Allowing Users to Reject Cookies Is Not Inherently a Bad Thing
In many cases, giving users a chance to reject cookies that collect their personal information is the right thing to do.
Allowing users to reject cookies means you’re giving them real choice and control over what happens to their personal information. This builds trust and creates a better relationship between your brand and your consumers.
It also helps with increasing the quality of the data you do end up collecting through the use of cookies.
Think of it this way:
If a privacy-conscious consumer uses a VPN to change their IP and act like they’re from a different location, the data you collect about them is technically faulty and not helpful for marketing purposes or targeted ads.
But if that same consumer simply opts out of having cookies placed on their browser, you no longer collect faulty or wrong information about the people who visit your site.
Tools like Termly’s Consent Management Platform can help you manage user consent in line with privacy laws.
It includes a custom consent banner and is compatible with essential data mapping features like Google Consent Mode and the IAB TCF 2.3, so you can rest easy even if someone rejects your website cookies.
Written by Masha Komnenic CIPP/E, CIPM, CIPT, FIP
Masha Komnenic is a legal counsel and Termly’s Director of Global Privacy, who received her law degree from Belgrade University. She specializes in implementing, monitoring, and auditing business compliance with privacy regulations (HIPAA, PIPEDA, ePrivacy Directive, GDPR, CCPA, POPIA, LGPD).
Read all posts by Masha Komnenic CIPP/E, CIPM, CIPT, FIP
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