Designer and AI tinkerer. Co-founder at muchskills and Up Strategy Lab. Serial product developer... some even make it public... on the internet.
Sweden
Joined April 2008
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Cookie Away is now open source 🍪 It's a small Chrome extension I've been using since last winter that rejects cookie banners for me, including the ones that hide "Reject" three screens deep. MIT license, so do whatever you like with it.
github.com/upstrategylab/coo…
There are good projects doing similar things (Consent-O-Matic, DuckDuckGo's autoconsent) and I'd recommend them too. I mostly wanted something that handles the settings-heavy banners properly, and it felt a waste to keep it to myself.
Most of it was built with Claude Code, which made a side project like this possible at all. I'd describe what broke on a site, and we'd work out why together.
For banners it can't read at all there's an optional fallback using Jev by TypeSafe, which works out which button is which in any language. It's off by default, uses your own API key, and only the banner text gets sent.
It also got a few safety rails. It checks that every click actually closed the banner, never clicks links that leave the page, and pauses itself on a site if the banner keeps coming back. Before that it was very good at getting stuck in reload loops.
My favourite, some sites run two consent tools at the same time. You reject the first one and there's a second one waiting underneath (I'd love to have been in that meeting).
Some things I learnt the hard way. Sourcepoint, used by loads of publishers, never worked, because its frame starts out 0×0 pixels and my code was politely ignoring tiny frames. Another tool hides its banner in a closed shadow root, which normal page scripts can't see at all.
News sites are the hardest. Many have no reject button at all, so you open "Manage options", object to a long list of "legitimate interests" and save. Some only let you reject if you pay. Cookie Away now goes through the settings for you (and never clicks subscribe).
The first version was simple. Find the banner, find the button that says reject, click it. That works surprisingly often, until you meet the big consent platforms and the news sites, which is where it got interesting.
The why is pretty simple. Almost every site makes "Accept all" one click and "Reject" a small project, and I got tired of doing that small project over and over (it's not a lot of time, but it's annoying in a very specific way).
The time it takes for a generation to become technically left behind has shrunk from a decade to about a couple of months now. Basically if you're not keeping up, you are your own grandpa now...
Love JEV btw... 👛 @CompleteSkeptic just a heads up, there seems to be a drafting gap in your Terms vs your PP when it comes to training data for AI. I built a tool that helps me map out legal texts for in house council teams for tech companies. Still in a closed beta.
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@EUCouncil @lufthansa @FlyingBrussels @BrusselsAirport genuinely curious why Brussels Airlines charges for water onboard when most major carriers just include it free.