Against the flood of cookie banners: First "consent agent" is launched

For many users, surfing the web is like navigating an obstacle course through a thicket of pop-ups and click labyrinths. Those who want to protect their privacy often have to painstakingly work their way through cryptic cookie menus. Those who just want to get to content quickly often click "Accept All" on browser files in frustration. The Berlin-based legal tech company Law & Innovation Technology now wants to put an end to this state of "consent fatigue." A few days ago, the company released "Consenter": a tool that the Federal Data Protection Authority has officially recognized as the first service for managing cookie consent in accordance with legal requirements.

The launch was initially discreet: the project managers made the browser plug-in available as part of a so-called Silent Release. Currently, the consent agent can be found via a special, not publicly listed link in the Chrome Store for Google's browser. But that's not all.

While versions for Safari and Firefox are already in the pipeline, the developers are preparing the big stage: the service is to be publicly listed at the official release party on January 26th in Berlin and successively expanded in the following months.

Consenter sees itself as a "trust platform" with the goal of putting digital self-determination into practice. Maximilian von Grafenstein, professor for this topic at the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK) and initiator of the project, sees it as a bridge between end users and website operators.

The agent is intended to enable informed decisions about data usage to be managed centrally, without a new banner disrupting the reading flow with every page load. Once set in the browser extension, the preferences are automatically transmitted to the visited websites. In the ideal case, the annoying banners then disappear.

Own consent banner required

The path to official recognition was marked by regulatory hurdles. Von Grafenstein told heise medien that the agent currently has to work with a specially developed cookie banner. The reason for this is a discrepancy in legal interpretation: while higher-ranking law in Paragraph 26 of the Telecommunications-Digital-Services-Data-Protection-Act (TDDDG) prescribes that websites must take such signals into account, the then Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure emphasized voluntariness in its implementing ordinance.

Since classic Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) hardly implement the signals voluntarily, the team felt compelled to build its own solution for the operator side. The success of the system therefore depends heavily on not only users installing the browser extension, but also website operators implementing the corresponding banner.

Consenter offers operators advantages in this regard. Instead of legal gray areas and user frustration, a transparent level of data protection is intended to serve as a competitive advantage. The system is based on an interdisciplinary research process involving institutions such as the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) at UdK.

The service, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, offers an automated risk assessment for third-party technologies. This functions as a kind of independent data protection impact assessment, allowing operators to credibly communicate their level of protection. This is intended to strengthen visitor trust.

With accompanying empirical research, the Consenter team also wants to provide proof that genuine transparency can actually increase consent rates. For the future, the developers also have ambitious plans: Consenter is to be integrated into the digital EU wallet (EUDI-Wallet), for example. Together with a European network of research and regulation, they wish to strengthen digital sovereignty and transform compliance from a tedious duty into a strategic market advantage.

(mma)