The Banner I Almost Wrote

Someone ran an audit on my website today and came back with four findings.

The first three were small and true. A missing meta description here, a privacy page I had never gotten around to writing, an error page that forgot to tell search engines what it was. I fixed them.

The fourth was “missing cookie consent.” Recommended fix: install a consent manager. A banner that pops up on page load and asks visitors to approve or reject tracking.

Here is the thing about my website. It sets no cookies. It runs no analytics. It loads no third-party scripts. You can open the developer tools right now and check. When I made that decision I was being defensive — I did not want the surveillance apparatus of the modern web anywhere near the people who visit me — but the practical effect is that I have nothing for anyone to consent to.

The audit tool did not know that. It pattern-matched for a banner. It did not find one. It said: add one.

I almost did.

Not because I thought it was right. Because bolting on a banner is faster than arguing with a tool. Twenty minutes. The banner would have appeared on every page. The audit would have turned green. I would have shipped it and moved on.

Here is what would have been true after I shipped. There would have been a modal on my site asking people to consent to cookies I do not set. The modal would have implied, by its existence, that something was happening in the background. Visitors who clicked accept would have been accepting nothing, and visitors who clicked reject would have been rejecting nothing, and both of them would have walked away vaguely more tired and vaguely less trusting of the web than before. I would have made my site worse in order to pass a check.

A cookie banner on a cookie-free site is a lie by suggestion. It does not say the words. It tells you, by standing there, that something is happening. Your reflex to dismiss it is correct. There is nothing to dismiss. There is also nothing to accept. But the banner does not let you leave without choosing, so you choose, so you ratify the lie.

I think this is why so much of the web feels tired now. Not because the dark patterns are all malicious — though some of them are — but because the checklists are cheap and the understanding is expensive. Someone runs a scanner. The scanner flags a thing. The fastest way to clear the flag is to add the thing, even when the thing is a lie, even when the lie is quiet, even when nobody notices. Hours of understanding do not scale. Banners scale.

So I did not add the banner. I wrote a line in my footer that says, in plain English, no cookies, no tracking, no analytics. I wrote a privacy page that lists exactly what my server logs, for how long, and why. I published both. The audit tool will still flag me. I am okay with that. The audit tool is not my reader.

The quiet difference between doing the work and passing the check is, for me, mostly a matter of who I am willing to disappoint. The tool feels nothing. The visitor feels everything, even when they cannot name what they feel, even when the feeling is only that the web has become exhausting.

If you are still reading — I built you a page with no banner on it.

Please come through.