Consent fatigue simulator
How cookie erasure, in-app browsers, and cross-domain fragmentation multiply unnecessary consent banners for EU users.
Your browsing profile
Safari deletes script-writable cookies after 7 days (ITP).
Safari deletes script-writable cookies after 7 days (ITP).
These apps open links in their own built-in browser, which does not share cookies or extensions with your default browser.
Estimated in-app browsing: 9%
Your consent burden
Methodology
The model defines seven categories of sites by visit frequency: daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, occasional (~every 45 days, covering e-commerce, media, and banking sites), quarterly, and rare. Each browsing intensity profile specifies how many unique sites fall into each category.
For each site, annual visits equal 365 divided by the visit gap. The first visit always triggers a banner. For return visits, a share equal to the in-app browser percentage always triggers a banner (isolated webview, no stored cookies). Of the remaining visits through the default browser, a banner is triggered whenever the visit gap exceeds the cookie lifetime.
Cross-domain overlap is fixed at 35%. This models the fraction of sites that share a data processor with another visited site. When cross-domain coordination is enabled, those redundant first-visit banners are eliminated because consent expressed on one domain carries to sibling domains.
Browser choice determines cookie lifetime: Safari and Brave use 7 days (ITP), Firefox uses 30 days (ETP), Chrome, Edge, and Samsung Internet use 365 days. The effective cookie lifetime is a weighted blend of your desktop and mobile browser policies based on browsing split.
EU-scale figures multiply per-user numbers by 400 million internet users.
Model parameters
What causes this, and what would fix it
Toggle each cause to remove it and see how many unnecessary banners it accounts for.
Cookie erasure (ITP / ETP)
Browser tracking-prevention policies delete cookies used to store consent after just days or weeks. When you return to a site, your consent cookie is gone, so the banner appears again, even though you already answered it.
Fix: require browsers to respect the lawful retention period of consent cookies.
In-app browser isolation
Apps like Instagram, X, and LinkedIn open links in their own built-in browser. This sandboxed webview does not share cookies or extensions with your default browser, so every link opened from an app triggers a fresh consent banner.
Fix: mandate that external links open in the user’s default browser.
Cross-domain consent fragmentation
Data processors operate multiple websites (e.g. Google runs Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps). Each domain requires separate consent for the same preferences, because consent is scoped to the domain, not the processor.
Fix: cross-domain consent coordination via navigator.consent.