Google is finally giving Europeans an easy way to 'reject all' cookies

Google has announced that, after plenty of litigation and fines, Europeans are getting a dedicated “reject all” cookies button to save users from their manufactured strife. 

Appearing to users in Europe when accessing Search or YouTube while signed out or in Incognito Mode sometime “soon”, redesigned cookie banner finally makes the choice of rejecting cookies as easy as accepting them.

Previously users who didn’t want Google hoarding their cookies and tracking them throughout the web had to battle through deliberately confusing menus that were purposefully designed by Google to be just difficult enough that you’d relent and click the far easier “accept all” button. 

Thankfully this practice quickly drew the ire of European governments who have put new regulations in place to limit what websites can get away with. In trying to resist these updated regulations as much as possible, Google even recently found itself paying a €150 million fine from France’s data protection agency. 

According to Google, this is “not just a new button” as this update instead has meant that the tech giant needed to “re-engineer the way cookies work” on their sites across the web, presumably so they can still go about tracking you as much as possible. 

Throughout the blog post, Google also highlights the importance of cookies, suggesting that we should all be accepting them willingly since “they can do things like display text in your preferred language, make sure you’re a real user and not a pesky bot, or estimate whether or not an ad campaign is working.”