Do I need a cookie banner?

The longer version

In the EU and UK, consent is required before non-essential storage is set. That means the tags must not load until somebody agrees, which is the part most banners get wrong: the banner appears, the tags fire anyway, and the record says consent was obtained.

In the United States the framing is different. State privacy statutes generally give an opt-out rather than requiring prior consent, and several require you to honor a universal opt-out signal such as the Global Privacy Control.

A banner shown identically everywhere is therefore wrong somewhere. It either asks for consent nobody needed to give, or fails to obtain consent that was required.

What to do

1. List everything your site loads from another company. A browser network panel shows this in a minute.
2. Remove what you do not use. Analytics nobody reads is the most common finding, and deleting it removes the obligation entirely.
3. For what remains, make sure it genuinely does not load before consent, rather than loading behind a banner.
4. Make refusing as easy as accepting, and make withdrawal available later.

The obligation behind this

• Cookie consent
• GDPR
• State privacy laws